Introduction to Python
Welcome to your first steps in Python! 🎉🐍
Welcome to your first steps in Python! 🎉🐍
Before we start we should ask ourselves What is Python?
Python is a high-level interpreted programming language, created by Guido van Rossum. Its first release was in 1991.
This is one of the many definitions you'll find for Python, but we should understand that it's one of the most versatile, simple and powerful languages you can use today.
It's present in a ton of things like data science, Machine Learning, the Internet of things, etc. To give you an idea of its reach: it's there when you watch your favorite series because it's used by Netflix, in your favorite songs with Spotify or even at NASA. 🚀
Python has many advantages when used. Its philosophy is that the code you write should be readable and to avoid unreadable scripts. For example, code to print "Hello world" in C looks like this:
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("Hello world!");
return 0;
}
While in Python it can be done with a single line of code:
print('Hello world')
Main characteristics
As I mentioned before, Python is incredibly versatile—you can do everything with it. But here's a list of the characteristics that define it:
-
It's a general-purpose language
This means it's not limited to doing just one thing. You can develop web servers, IoT applications, web scrapers, data science, Deep Learning... basically its applications are endless 💚.
Multi-paradigm
In programming there are different ways to write code depending on your needs. If your goal is to simulate real-life objects you should use the object-oriented paradigm; if you want clean, efficient code without redundancy, then you might use a functional programming paradigm. As you can see, Python adapts to any of the many programming paradigms that exist—it's flexible to your needs.
Cross-platform
Since Python is an interpreted language, each line of its code is executed as it's read, which makes it easy to run on many devices—from supercomputers to devices with very limited specs like smartwatches. Python can run on almost everything! 💪
Dynamically typed
I think this is my favorite characteristic of all. In other programming languages you first have to declare what type of data the variable is (integer, float, string, etc.). But in Python that's not the case—here you just declare the variable you want in such a simple way that Python assigns the data type when it interprets the code.
message="Look Morty! I'm a string in Python Morty!"
number=5
list=[1,2,3,4,5]
Python is seriously a simple language to learn, so I invite you to continue with the next tutorial where you'll learn the basics and how to set up the work environment to develop with it. 🙌