What is Python and Who is it For?

Contrary to popular belief, Python, which takes its name not from the python snake but from the British comedy group Monty Python, is one of the most popular programming languages today. It was discovered by Guido von Rossum in the 1980s, and since then, Python's popularity has managed to grow exponentially.

Philosophies of Python;

• Beautiful is better than ugly.

• Explicit is better than implicit.

• Simple is better than complex.

• Complex is better than complicated.

• Readability counts.

Based on these philosophies, we can say that the secret of the language's popularity is its ease of learning, readability and rich library support. What do you think?

Python is referred as a dynamically-typed scripting language. So, you don't need a compilation like you're used to from other languages. The code is automatically compiled as you write each line. This is why run time error is a commonly seen error.

The codes written in .py format are converted from Python to bytecode by CPython. This bytecode is used by the Python virtual machine. This bytecode is interpreted when it is going to be run. This bytecode is then converted to machine codes and the program runs. The important point here is that when Python code is written in one OS and copied to another OS, it works the same way.

Why Python?

Machine learning, web applications, game development, data science... Even though these are all different fields, they all have Python in common :) Python is a very popular language among users as well as in the industry.

What are the disadvantages of Python?

We defined the term dynamically-typed scripting language previously. The disadvantage of this is that the code cannot run as fast as precompiled codes like C++. Another disadvantage is that if you are interested in mobile software, unfortunately Python is not for you :/ There is also a strict indentation rule, which is a formatting requirement, and some of you may not prefer this. Therefore, this can be written in the disadvantages column...

How about Python?

Now let's have a look at some codes...

print (“Hello!”)

input (“What is your name?”)

In the first line, the phrase written between "" marks is printed and in the other line, after the phrase written between "" marks is printed, the user is asked to enter input.

name = input (“What is your name?”)

print(“Hey!”,name,", how are you?")

In this modification we made, the input from the user is assigned to the variable named name and used in the other line. As you'll notice, in Python, the types of variables are indicated without having to specify them.

def add(a,b):

   print(a+b)

add(4,5)

When defining a function, the def keyword is written, followed by the function name. Parameters are written between '()' then ':' is added to move to the next line where operations are defined.

For more detailed learning, you can follow Python courses online on many platforms like Youtube and Udemy. You can download PyCharm and get started right away. If you haven't heard about PyCharm before, we invite you to read our article with our IDE recommendations :)