Does anyone still use python

Gradually he realized momentum was building and after some time regularly interacting with the Python community did he realize he had created something that could be successful.

After we did the first open source release, I built up a rhythm of doing new releases and interacting with the fledgling Python community that came into existence. That felt like a big deal. It was that sense that Python was a language whose time had come that also struck van Rossum, as the language began to gain traction in early to mid s. Van Rossum believes developers were drawn to Python by the same feeling that led him to create it in the first place.

They wanted a high-level scripting language that struck a balance between being easy-to-use and capable that didn't have the limitations of the Unix shell when handling complex logic. They wanted an end to C's insistence on developers wrangling with memory management and having to reimplement code for the same basic tasks at the start of each project. Warsaw says Python struck a balance between useability while also not sacrificing what it could do -- a balance not really on offer in any major programming language in the early s.

Python came on the scene, I was like, 'Wow, this is making programming fun again'," he says. What Python offered, and still offers, is clear and unambiguous syntax, where indentations group code into blocks, making the code easier for developers to understand.

Fintan Ryan, research director with the Application Platform Strategies team for analyst firm Gartner, says that clarity played a big role in winning over developers, both now and in the s, even if attributing such importance to indentation has proved divisive. You could enforce this in other languages, but Python enforced it automatically.

Some programmers love this, and some hate it," he says. The fact Python prioritizes clean and readable code is no accident, van Rossum is on record as saying programming languages are as much about communicating ideas between developers as they are about telling a computer what to do. On top of this readability, Ryan says that from early on Python offered a level of built-in functionality that made it stand out from other languages. Python also provided support for functions such as lambda, map, and filter, which proved extremely useful in a lot of cases," he says.

Python may never have existed at all had the popular programming languages in the late '80s been better, with one of van Rossum's motivations for creating Python being the incompatibility of the Perl scripting language with the Amoeba distributed computing system he was working on at CWI.

Even though Python attracted a user base of hard-core fans after its release, in the s Python was still very much a programming language underdog. Today Python is the fastest-growing programming language in terms of active developers, according to the annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey , one of the most comprehensive snapshots of programming language use available, while Perl has shrunk to the point where it didn't get a mention in the latest Stack Overflow report.

That explosive growth is captured by the graph below, showing how in recent years views of questions related to Python on Stack Overflow grew far faster than views of questions related to other languages. The growth in views of Python questions on Stack Overflow relative to other programming languages reflects the huge growth in Python users. So how did Python leapfrog its erstwhile rival, and how to explain the two languages' vastly different fortunes?

Van Rossum believes it has something to do with how easy it is to maintain a code base once it grows beyond a certain size. While in Python, even if you don't have all that much discipline, the code will still be fairly readable and fairly maintainable.

That combination of Python offering a programming language that is simple to get started with but that is also robust enough to be used to write large applications is what van Rossum attributes to its initial success in the s. As use of Python spread in the s, van Rossum, still working at CWI, found his creation was increasingly putting him in contact with people from across the world.

I was having the time of my life," he says. By the mid s, Python was starting to be used in new ways, from scripts for audio recording and playback to its first foray into web development, which would go on to become a mainstay for Python. Gartner's Ryan says what sealed Python's popularity among developers during the s was how it became a favorite choice for quickly creating powerful scripts.

More than that, however, Ryan says the language was sufficiently versatile and so easy to pick up that it appealed to many different types of users with a range of technical expertise. Foreshadowing how Python would come to be favored by researchers and scientists for its ease of use, McLay was interested in how Python could be used by scientists at the NBS who van Rossum says "had a considerable amount of data to process but weren't very good coders".

That placement would prove to be the catalyst for both Python's future evolution and a major change in van Rossum's life. It was during this placement that the very first Python workshop would be held at the NBS's offices, where van Rossum, Barry Warsaw, and other early Python enthusiasts came together to discuss what they were doing with Python and hopes for the language's future development.

That meeting resulted in a job offer to come work with Kahn at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives CNRI , a nonprofit research group based in Virginia focused on the strategic development of network technologies. Just as Python had answered the need for a new type of programming language, van Rossum says the job offer came at exactly the time when he was starting to question his future at CWI. Earlier, also, as a result of Python, some other prospects had come my way where, after a bunch of phone calls and thinking, I had decided not to go for it.

But here, I liked the people, I liked what they were offering me, the project, and I went for it. It was at CNRI that van Rossum put together many of the structures for managing the Python language, with the help of a team of fellow Python enthusiasts. After joining CNRI in April , van Rossum led a small team of developers working on building Knowbot Programs , software known as mobile agents designed to be run across distributed computer systems like the internet. The community of Python users had grown significantly since its public release in , and by the second half of the decade the language was attracting a sizeable global user base.

During that period, the management of the language began to be formalized, with the establishment of the precursor to the Python Software Foundation PSF , which would be set up in As the community grew, the biannual Python workshops that started in morphed into larger annual events, and eventually PSF's annual PyCon, which is still going strong today.

By the turn of the 21st century, the language was larger than any one person, with a sizeable community playing an active role in its development, a long way from the summer of , when early Python users fretted about what would happen to the language ' if Guido was hit by a bus '.

Van Rossum continued to play a core role, however, and the idea of him being at the heart of the language never went away, as evidenced by him being nicknamed "Benevolent dictator for life" BDFL of the language, a tongue-in-cheek title that stuck for years.

Gartner's Ryan says it's not particularly unusual for a language's creator to act as that language's steward, citing Larry Wall with Perl and Ryan Dahl with the JavaScript runtime Node. Indeed, it's the open nature of Python's development, via public debate between a community of core developers, that van Rossum attributes to being a deciding factor in Python's success.

In the intervening years, there have been major leaps forward in Python, the introduction of Python 3. Those changes were triggered last year, when van Rossum stepped down from his leadership role as BDFL, following public disagreement over the introduction of Assignment Expressions to the language, mooted in the Python Enhancement Proposal PEP While their introduction was designed to make it possible to write more efficient code, van Rossum faced heavy criticism online from those opposed to the change, with some arguing their use would make code less readable and harder to maintain.

Van Rossum says he was used to debate over new features, but it was the intransigence of some of his detractors and also the personal nature of certain attacks that made up his mind to step down.

Turn on JavaScript to exercise your cookie preferences for all non-essential cookies. You can read FutureLearn's Cookie policy here. Category: Digital Skills , Tech , What is. Despite starting out as a hobby project named after Monty Python, Python is now one of the most popular and widely used programming languages in the world. Besides web and software development, Python is used for data analytics, machine learning, and even design.

As we outlined in our summary post on what different programming languages are used for , Python is an object-oriented based around data , high-level easier for humans to understand programming language. According to the TIOBE index , which measures the popularity of programming languages, Python is the third most popular programming language in the world, behind only Java and C. There are many reasons for the ubiquity of Python, including:. So, we know why Python is so popular at the moment, but why should you learn how to use it?

Aside from the ease of use and versatility mentioned above, there are several good reasons to learn Python:. Many of our short courses, such as Getting Started with Python , take weeks to complete, with only a few hours of learning required each week. Our deep learning and Python programming ExpertTrack takes 21 weeks to complete, with hours of study needed every week.

Clearly, Python is a popular and in-demand skill to learn. But what is python programming used for? Python can be used for:. In fact, Python is among the favourite languages among data scientists, and there are many Python machine learning and AI libraries and packages available. You can discover the uses of Python and deep learning while boosting your career in AI. Much like AI and machine learning, data analytics is another rapidly developing field that utilises Python programming. Python for data science and analytics makes sense.

You can learn about data analytics using Python with our ExpertTrack, which will help you develop practical data analytics skills. Data visualisation is another popular and developing area of interest. Again, it plays into many of the strengths of Python. Examples include Pandas Visualization and Plotly. The possibilities are vast, allowing you to transform data into meaningful insights.

If data visualisation with Python sounds appealing, check out our week ExpertTrack on the subject. You can program all kinds of applications using Python. Learn more. Why do people hesitate to use Python 3? Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 7 months ago. Active 7 years, 10 months ago. Viewed 76k times. Improve this question.

Are there really so many new projects starting using Python 2? Or is it just long-established projects like Django? Michael Easter - He doesn't have to. Just check the python tag on SO; a lot of people up there are of the opinion "learn 2. Have you not seen the Python 3 Wall of Shame? Show 6 more comments.

Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Updated based on the progress over the last 18 months and explicitly noted the fact that 3. To a degree i. Proposed time frame doesn't seem so enthusiastic now in : — zetah. The way I see it and I will be burned at the stake by some for this is that on the encoding front, Py3 violated and still does, as this things go the Zen of Python in the "pragmatism beats purity" point: Py3 is encoding-pure. Py2 was encoding-pragmatic.

I've written more on that at developerblog. Show 3 more comments. I believe that a lot of the hesitation comes from two things: If it ain't broke, don't fix it [XYZ library] we require doesn't have a 3. The dependency-doesn't-have-a-port issue is recursive, as well. What's needed is for widely used libraries that have few or no dependencies outside the stdlib to port, which can then start a chain reaction.

I'd switch the order. A lot of us are pacing around, waiting for a particular package to migrate to 3. Tony - that's why I think it's a great boon for 3. Lott - I guess it really depends on if 3 offers something you want. To be honest, I only very recently moved from 2. Porting old code with the aid of 2to3 isn't as hard as some people fear, either, though.

Why write for Python 3 when no-one can use your code without mucking about with the internals of their OS? Show 2 more comments. For new projects the policy is plain and simple, it all starts on the following points: Does any distro like Ubuntu ship Python 3 in their default installation?

What is the library ecosystem for Python 3. Are all the frameworks et al compatible with Python 3. Add a comment. Steve Steve 8, 1 1 gold badge 27 27 silver badges 45 45 bronze badges. Hell, I'm still using Fortran The only thing Python 3 really offers is a "cleaner" syntax. Comparing Python 3 and Perl 6 is wrong. Python 3 is a incremental jump from Python 2 whereas Perl 6 is a total ground up redesign. Perl 5 and Perl 6 are sister languages and will continue to co exist for a long time.

On the other hand, Python 3 plans to replace Python 2 ,not just co exist. This is a big difference. Perl 6 is still under development. Yes, Rakudo Perl is the closest implementation to the Perl 6 specification but doesn't implement everything yet.