Python was invented by Guido van Rossum as a general-purpose programming language.
You can use python for almost all sorts of programming tasks from ETL development, website development, games, dashboards, web applications, to machine learning, and AI!
The motivation behind the creation of python was to make programming easy and understandable by everyone.
Python is an old language! it was created in December-1989 as a hobby project! Later on a few years down the line, it is one of the most widely used programming language in the world today!
Why the name python?
“python” is a kind of weird sounding name for a programming language! When you compare it with C, C++, or JAVA! All others sound a little more like programming languages! The name “python” was given because Guido van Rossum was a fan of a circus series of that time called “Monty Python’s Flying Circus“!
Why python is so popular?
There are many reasons for python being popular
- Open source: Everyone loves good free stuff! One of the biggest factors for the general adoption of python is it’s being free, anyone can use it and they don’t have to pay anything.
- Huge community: Since it is free, many developers, organizations use python around the world, and everyone is free to contribute. You can write a new piece of code/library and contribute to the python community. Hence, this creates big support to those who are getting started with it, because, there is a solution available online for almost every problem.
- Fast: With the use of libraries like numpy and tensorflow, large computations are done very fast using vector and matrix-based computation.
- Platform independent: You can code python in MacBook and run the same code in Linux and windows!
- Easy to understand: One of the main motto behind the creation of python. Anyone can understand its code easily.
- Leader in AI/ML: Python is currently the go-to language for all kinds of machine learning and Artificial intelligence solutions. The huge list of useful libraries like numpy, pandas, sklearn, keras, tensorflow, etc. makes it very easy for someone to implement an AI/ML solution with just a few lines of code!
What are some limitations of python?
- Version Dependency: One biggest flaw of python is version dependency. If you write a code in version-2.7 it will not run in version-3.5! More worse, some of the code written in version-3.5 will not run in version-3.7 as well.
- Syntax changes between versions: I have personally hated this the most! imagine a line of code you have learned and used about python in version-3.5 and that syntax has been changed to something else in a later versions! For example: The function train_test_split() was previously accessible under the module cross_validation, it is now moved to a different module name model_selection! I mean why? Similarly “nb_epochs” parameter in keras was renamed to “epochs”!… again! why? what was the difference anyway!
- Pathetic library installation: Every time I fire the “pip install…” command, I literally cross my fingers and pray that it should run properly or worse.. it should not break the existing setup! some of the time, the pip command would do all the uninstallation of existing libraries and at the end throw some permission error! So the damage is also not reversed and everything is a mess.
To conclude, Python is one of the most widely used languages in the world today. It is also the most sought after skill for a Data Scientist’s job.
