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PYTHON – What’s in Store ?

PYTHON – What’s in Store ?

Python has gained a lot of popularity in the programming world and is considered as an extremely powerful language. There’s a reason why companies like Google, Dropbox Spotify and Netflix use it. If we take a look at these companies, we can see they benefit from Python for its ease of use and because it’s great for rapid prototyping and iteration. 

Python has efficient high-level data structures and a simple but effective approach to object-oriented programming. Python's elegant syntax and dynamic typing, together with its interpreted nature, make it an ideal language for scripting and rapid application development in many areas on most platforms.

Further to list down a few advantages we have

Easy-to-learn and understand : Being a very high level language, Python reads like English, which takes a lot of syntax-learning stress off coding beginners. It doesn’t matter if you have been acquainted with other programming languages before -- both programmers and non-programmers can use Python easily because of its syntax.

Object-Oriented: In a nutshell, object-oriented programming lets a user create data structures which can then be re-used. This reduces the amount of repeated work that needs to be done.

Absolutely Free of Charge: Being an Open-Source Software, Python is accessible to anyone. The pre-made binaries are distributed by the Python Software Foundation, and the code can also be modified and re-distributed as allowed by the CPython license.

Cross Platform: As has been mentioned before, Python is available on all major operating systems—MS Windows, Mac OS X, and different flavours of Linux.

Active Community: Like any good open-source project, Python has an active community. Many great developers contribute daily to the Python community by creating Python libraries. These libraries can help you get started so that you don’t have to write code to reinvent the wheel. So for example, if you want to do complex image processing, the Python Imaging Library will help you get started. Want to create games? PyGame is a Python game engine. If data science is your thing, SciPy is the library for you.

Safety First: Unlike other languages based in C, Python does not have any pointers. This makes the language much more reliable. Errors also never silently pass unless this is explicitly ordered. This will allow the user to read and see why the resulting program crashed, allowing efficient error correction.

Greatly Extensible: Aside from the standard libraries, there are also extensive collections of add-on modules that are freely available. There are also frameworks and libraries, as well as toolkits that all conform to conventions and standards. As an example, nearly all the database adapters (used in talking to any client-server engine like Oracle, MySQL, Posrgres, etc.) conform to Python DBAPI, thus allowing users to access them using the same code. This makes it easy to modify Python programs to support any type of database engine.

Not a rosy walk in the Park!

Then of course, like with any programming language, not everything is a rosy walk in the park. There are a couple of disadvantages in it that one should still watch out for as he learns:

-Speed. Unlike languages that need to be separately compiled and then executed, Python is executed by an interpreter. This causes it to be slower. For most applications, this will not pose a problem. However, there are certain instances when an increase in speed is desirable. This brings up one idiom coined by Python users: “Speed is not a problem until it is a problem”.

-Not Easy to Maintain: Because Python is a dynamically typed language, the same thing can easily mean something different depending on the context. As a Python app grows larger and more complex, this may get difficult to maintain as errors will become difficult to track down and fix, so it will take experience and insight to know how to design your code or write unit tests to ease maintainability.

However with the rise of big data, Python developers are in demand as data scientists, especially since Python can be easily integrated into web applications to carry out tasks that require machine learning.

As an open source project, Python is actively worked on with a moderate update cycle, pushing out new versions every year or so to make sure it remains relevant.

Clearly, Python will continue to reign in terms of relevance, and has a pretty good future thanks to its large community.

Written By - 

Aparajita Mohanty

    18-09-2017         9 : 23 PM

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