What is Python?
Python is a high-level, cross-platform, and open-sourced programming language released under a GPL-compatible license. Python Software Foundation (PSF), a non-profit organization, holds the copyright of Python.
Guido Van Rossum conceived Python in the late 1980s. It was released in 1991 at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands as a successor to the ABC language. He named this language after a popular comedy show called 'Monty Python's Flying Circus' (and not after Python-the snake).
In the last few years, its popularity has increased immensely. According to stackoverflow.com's recent survey, Python is in the top three Most Loved Programming Language in 2020.
Official Web Site: https://www.python.org
Python Features:
- Python is an interpreter-based language, which allows the execution of one instruction at a time.
- Extensive basic data types are supported e.g., numbers (floating point, complex, and unlimited-length long integers), strings (both ASCII and Unicode), lists, and dictionaries.
- Variables can be strongly typed as well as dynamic typed.
- Supports object-oriented programming concepts such as class, inheritance, objects, module, namespace etc.
- Cleaner exception handling support.
- Supports automatic memory management.
- Various built-in and third-party modules, which can be imported and used independently in the Python application.
Python Advantages
- Python provides enhanced readability. For that purpose, uniform indents are used to delimit blocks of statements instead of curly brackets, like in many languages such as C, C++, and Java.
- Python is free and distributed as open-source software. A large programming community is actively involved in the development and support of Python libraries for various applications such as web frameworks, mathematical computing, and data science.
- Python is a cross-platform language. It works equally on different OS platforms like Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, etc. Hence Python applications can be easily ported across OS platforms.
- Python supports multiple programming paradigms including imperative, procedural, object-oriented, and functional programming styles.
- Python is an extensible language. Additional functionality (other than what is provided in the core language) can be made available through modules and packages written in other languages (C, C++, Java, etc.)
- A standard DB-API for database connectivity has been defined in Python. It can be enabled using any data source (Oracle, MySQL, SQLite etc.) as a backend to the Python program for storage, retrieval, and processing of data.
- The standard distribution of Python contains the Tkinter GUI toolkit, which is the implementation of a popular GUI library called Tcl/Tk. An attractive GUI can be constructed using Tkinter. Many other GUI libraries like Qt, GTK, WxWidgets, etc. are also ported to Python.
- Python can be integrated with other popular programming technologies like C, C++, Java, ActiveX, and CORBA.
Python Tools and Frameworks
The following lists important tools and frameworks to develop different types of Python applications: