Python is such a general purpose language that is used in many applications and domains like web development, education, desktop GUI, software development etc. It sands for handling integration tasks, being versatile and extensible (the Python Packages include thousands of third party modules for python). In web development, Python is mostly found on the back end side with frameworks such as Django and Pyramid, micro-frameworks like Flask and Bottle and advanced content management systems such as Plone.
Python Features
Python did not become so popular by chance. There stand several reasons (features) why this langauge made it to a lot of applications and users all around the world. The following introduce the most important ones:
• Easy to Learn - Nobody would prefer a language that is hard to learn (at least the basics). Python is a minimalistic language.
It makes programmers focus on the problem and not on the language because of the pseudo-code it has that feels like reading English. The syntax is so simple that most people get surprised when being introduced to it for the first time.
• Open Source - To be clear, open source is not just about being free. It means people can freely distribute copies of it, access the source code and most importantly, make changes to it for use in personal projects. The language is constantly being improved by a wide community of developers.
• High-Level Language - The higher the language level, the less you have to worry about how the machine understands it. For example, if in C you have to think of memory allocation, you don’t have to in Python. Low level details are avoided in a lot of aspects in Python.
• Portability - Being open source comes with great advantages, and one of them is bringing the language to a whole bunch of platforms like Linux,Windows, Macintosh, FreeBSD etc. If you are careful enough to avoid system dependent code, than your programs will work seamlessly in all platforms.
• Object Oriented - Both procedure-oriented programming (which is building a program around procedures/functions that are pieces of reusable code) and object-oriented programming are supported in Python. They are powerful tools in the hands of developers and come in really simple ways of implementation.
• Extensibility - Python takes future growth of implementation seriously. You can code a part of the program in C or C++ for performance reasons and use it in your Python program. Python is also embeddable. You can embed it within your C/C++ programs to give them "scripting" capabilities for your program’s users.
• Interpreted - Python instructions are executed directly, without previously being compiled into machine-language instructions. In other words, it does not need compilation to binary code, and you can run the program directly from the source code.
