Introduction to Python

Introduction To Python

The following article provides an outline for Introduction to Python. In terms of programming language Python is an interpreted, general-purpose, high-level programming language. Language first appeared 30 years ago in 1991, it was developed by Guido van Rossum. Python provides awesome code readability, and nowadays it is used widely by programmers and developers all across the world.

What Is Python?

As we know it is a high-level programming language that means a person can understand it easily. Python is easy to learn and use, it’s just like you are giving instructions in English. Python requires fewer numbers of lines of code compared to other programming languages. Python is an interpreted language that is one can execute one line of the code after the other one, and can easily be debugged.

Where Python Can Be Used?

Python is quite famous in Machine learning and Data science and has become the number one choice in the last couple of years. Python as a programming language can be used in most programming cases.

Below are some of the applications where python is used:

Web Development
Game Development
Data Science
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Deep Learning
Web Scrapping
Desktop GUI
Embedded Applications

Comparing Python With Other Programming Languages

There are number of programming languages available in the market like Java, C, C , JavaScript, etc.

Let’s see some of the most used languages with Python:

Java: In terms of performance, Java programs are faster than python programs. But python programs take less time to develop than java programs. It can be perceived by seeing the size of the program also. A typical Python program is around 3 times shorter than the java program.
JavaScript: JavaScript can be simply perceived as the subset of python’s “object-based”. Python can write simple functions without defining variables and class. On the other hand, JavaScript is all about classes and variable definition. Python provides better code reusability than compared to javascript.
Perl: Python and Perl both share the same background and have a lot of features in common but with a different philosophy. Perl focuses on application-oriented tasks and has built-in regular expression, report generation, and file scanning features. While Python focuses on common programming methods like data structure design & OOPs concepts. Python encourages easy code writing and thus easy maintainability.
4. C, C: What we saw about java applies in the case of C and C. Here also python code is comparatively easy to read and write and 4 to 8 times shorter than code written in C, C . If python coding takes one month to complete, if the same code is written in C, C it will take more than 6 months. There are plenty of languages out there some have their niche and are unparallel but python outshines in the overall features set.

How To Download And Install Python?

It is very easy to download python and start working on it. Python only needs 25 MB disk space, which is not much, and in case you reinstall install it would be within 100 MB.

You can download python from the below link for the version you want to work on.

https://www.python.org/downloads/

You can select the OS for the python version and download it in just a couple of seconds. You will get a .exe file once you click on download. Save it in the software directory of your machine (As it is easy to see all your soft-wares in one space). Right-click on the .exe file and run it as Administrator. A Python setup window will pop-up, select your directory, and also check the box where it mentions add Python to Path, as it will add the path to your environment variables and click on install. And Python will be installed on your machine.

Conclusion – Introduction to Python

In this article, we get a brief introduction to what is python and where it stands compared to other programming languages in the segment. We also have seen how to install python as per your OS and the version you want to work on. Now to work on python you can use either terminal or any IDE of your choice and start exploring python.