1.7 Python

  • Python is an object-oriented scripting language
  • Released publicly in 1991
  • Developed by Guido van Rossum of the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam.
  • Has rapidly become one of the world’s most popular programming languages
  • Particularly popular for educational and scientific computing
  • Recently surpassed the programming language R as the most popular data-science programming language

1.7 Python (cont.)

  • Some reasons why Python is popular:
    • Open source, free and widely available with a massive open-source community
    • Easier to learn than many other languages, enabling novices and professional developers to get up to speed quickly
    • Easier to read than many other popular programming languages
    • Widely used in education.
    • Enhances developer productivity with extensive standard libraries and third-party open-source libraries
      • Programmers can write code faster and perform complex tasks with minimal code
    • Massive numbers of free open-source Python applications
    • Popular in web development (e.g., Django, Flask)
    • Supports popular procedural, functional-style and object-oriented programming
    • Build anything from simple scripts to complex apps with massive numbers of users, such as Dropbox, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram and Quora
    • Popular in artificial intelligence, which is enjoying explosive growth, in part because of its special relationship with data science
    • Widely used in the financial community
    • Extensive job market for Python programmers across many disciplines, especially in data-science-oriented positions, and Python jobs are among the highest paid of all programming jobs

Anaconda Python Distribution

  • Easy to install on Windows, macOS and Linux and supports the latest versions of Python, the IPython interpreter and Jupyter Notebooks
  • Also includes other software packages and libraries commonly used in Python programming and data science
  • IPython interpreter

Zen of Python

  • Tim Peters’ The Zen of Python summarizes Python creator Guido van Rossum’s design principles for the language
  • List can be viewed in IPython with the command import this
  • The Zen of Python is defined in Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) 20
    • “A PEP is a design document providing information to the Python community, or describing a new feature for Python or its processes or environment”

©1992–2020 by Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This content is based on Chapter 1 of the book Intro to Python for Computer Science and Data Science: Learning to Program with AI, Big Data and the Cloud.

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