Python: Powerful and Intuitive Programming Language
As the name suggests, this article will be purely based on “Python-Scripting Language”. If you are eager to get more knowledge on Python, this article will help you in that aspect.
A language developed in the late 1980s has become one of the most popular languages in almost every stream in today’s software world. In January 2021, Python ranks third in TIOBE’s index of most popular programming languages, behind C and Java. Although In 2020 it gained second place with their award for the most popularity gain. Its first version was released in 1991 and then Python 2.0 was released in 2000.
Python is a high-level, object-oriented programming language with line by line interpreter. It helps programmers write clear, logical code for small and large-scale projects. It is dynamically typed and supports multiple programming paradigms, including structured, object-oriented and functional programming.
In addition, It is a great add-on to your programming language list and very easy for a beginner to learn. It is a must for students and working professionals to become great Software Engineers especially when they are working in Web Development Domain. Its latest release is 3.9 released on October 5th, 2020 with new features that are discussed later in the article.
Below is a basic “Hello World” code.
Python is platform-independent and can run on a variety of operating systems. The updated and current source code, binaries, documentation, news, etc., is available on the official website of Python https://www.python.org/.
Here, you can download Python documentation from https://www.python.org/doc/. For python installation, you can follow the below steps:
For UNIX and LINUX Installation:
- Open your browser and go to https://www.python.org/downloads/.
- Download zipped source code available for Unix/Linux.
- Download and extract files.
- Edit the Setup file if you want to customize some options otherwise, you can skip this step.
- Run “./configure” script
- Make
- Make Install
This will install Python at standard location /usr/local/bin and its libraries at /usr/local/lib/python<version>.
Windows Installation:
- In your browser, go to https://www.python.org/downloads/.
- Download the Windows installer python-<version>.msi file for whichever version required.
- Run the downloaded file.
- This brings up the Python install wizard prompt, which is really easy to use. Just accept the default settings, wait until the install is finished.
Once Python is installed in your system, you can carry on with your learning. There are various editors also available for python coding some of which are Pycharm, Atom, Sublime Text, etc. You can download one of these editors and can start coding. You can use IDLE also for basic codes, the built-in editor for python.
Below are links to a few of the editors for your reference:
Atom: https://atom.io/
Sublime Text: https://www.sublimetext.com/
With this information, you are good to start learning python. There are plenty of tutorials and documents for you to explore.
I would like to share some new features in Python 3.9 release also. In this release,
- Merge (|) and Update (|=) Operators have been added to the built-in dict class. Union Operators To dictionary (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0584/).
- We get relaxed grammar restrictions on decorators (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0614/).
- String methods to remove prefixes suffixes (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0616/).
- Flexible function and variable annotations (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0593/).
- A new module is added, “zoneinfo”, to provide a concrete time zone implementation supporting the IANA time zone database. By default, zoneinfo will use the system’s time zone data if available; if no system time zone data is available, the library will fall back to using the first-party package tzdata (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0615/)
In addition, these were a few of the updated features in the latest release.
For more information, you can go to https://docs.python.org/3/
Hope this article added some knowledge and encouraged you to start your programming journey.
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