Ch 1: Getting Started

Why Walk When You Can Fly With Python

When, Where And How It All Began?

Python development began in the late 1989.


Guido Van Rossum, a researcher at National
Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam (CWI), needed a high level scripting language for administrative tasks. Necessity is the mother of inventions and thus was born the Python language.




Python was introduced publicly in 1991 and since then a steadily growing community of Python developers and users have contributed in improving and making Python what it is today.




Python programming language is named after the British surreal comedy group Monty Python that created the famous Monty Python's Flying Circus. Every language has its own philosophy. Python's philosophy has its own uniqueness and is known by the name of "Zen Of Python".

Python: In A League Of It's Own

Why walk, when you can run and better still, why run, when you can fly. Yes, you can really learn to fly with python programming language. Have problem with the C's pointer manipulation or trouble understanding the complex OOP model(Object Oriented Programming) of Java. Then, python language is the solution to your problems. The best thing I like about python is getting the maximum bang from a bare minimum of code. That's what we programmers ultimately aim for, isn't it? To get things in perspective, suffice is to say that you can actually build a complete web crawler with indexing feature in a couple of dozens of lines of code!

For example, following are the constructs in different languages for printing a simple line of text to the screen.

Java:

System.out.println("The road less travelled by.");

C:

printf("The road less travelled by.");
//and that too after including the stdio.h header file

C#:

System.Console.WriteLine("The road less travelled by.");

I mean what's the point in going through so much pain when in python you can just do the above by the following line of code.

print "Lean to fly with python"           #neat isn't it?

 

Advantages Of Python

I will not get into the specifics of the benefits of python programming language, as theory is not what I'll concern myself with in my blog but still would like to briefly highlight these points.

• Python is designed so that a novice as well as an experienced programmer can easily learn the language.



• Python is portable as well as extensible. Programs can be developed rapidly without sacrificing scalability and maintenance.



• Python is a modularly extensible language i.e. new modules developed my anyone can be incorporated to extend its capabilities.



• Python is platform independent making it portable enough to run on any platform thereby extending its credibility.



• Compared to any other languages python has a more precise code i.e. a piece of code written in C will be 2 to 10 times more compact in python.



• Most importantly the English language like constructs make it all the more easier for the novice programmers to get started with python in no time.

And You Wonder Where It Is Used

Python's implementation ranges from typical desktop applications to controlling a highly sophisticated NASA space expedition rover. Following are some of the domains based on Python's implementation.

• Desktop Applications
• BitTorrent, original P2P client
• DropBox, a web-based file-hosting system
• Cinema 4D, a program for creating 3D art and animation
• Ubuntu Software Center, graphical package manager in Ubuntu
• Wikipad, a wiki-like platform for managing ideas, contacts etc.
• Web Applications
• OpenERP, open source software for business applications
• ERP5, a powerful open source ERP / CRM used in Banking and e-government
• Video games
• Civilization IV uses python for most of it's development
• Frets On Fire is written in Python and uses Pygame
• Web Frameworks
• Django, an MVT (model, view, template) web framework
• Google App Engine, platform for developing and hosting web applications
• TurboGears, another web framework based on python

Last but not the least, suffice is to say that Google uses Python for most of it's services.