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Engineers in these five areas love Python

Written by Clarion Tech | Nov 15, 2016 1:17:00 PM
Guido van Rossum, the creator of one of the most powerful programming languages in recent times - Python - came up with this unique and interesting name from his favorite comedy group Monty Python's Flying Circus. Python in an open source, dynamic, and object-oriented programming language that has gained wide popularity in the programming world primarily due to its simple syntax and readability. It also closely resembles the English language. Python is relatively easy to learn, making it a great language for beginners. It can be interpreted by a number of operating systems like UNIX, Mac OS, MS-DOS, OS/2, and Windows. Python was also tagged as the most popular coding languages for the year 2016. The use of Python as the language for software development spans across several applications. Below are a few instances where Python is extensively used in the real world

Web Development:

There are a variety of frameworks available for creating robust websites using Python. To name a few, there is Webapp2, which is a simple framework that can be used for developing web-based content with support for cloud services. There are other MVC web frameworks for Python such as Flask and Django which are popular and are being widely used. These frameworks adhere to the MVC design principles and help in the easy development of complex and database-driven websites. The Python architecture makes it a well-designed and robust language. With simple syntax, strict indentation enforcement, Python is more readable than other popular programming languages. The debugging tools available with the Python downloader package are easy to use and are extremely useful for developers.

Data Analytics:

Python has in-built scientific libraries and functions to support most of the statistical operations and models. The common libraries for analytics include NumPy and SciPy, which are used for fundamental scientific computing. The Matplotlib library assists in plotting and visualization techniques. The Scikit-learn library is used for machine learning and data mining. With the introduction of Pandas, Python has become very effective in performing faster and accurate operations on structured data and it is one of the most effective tools for all mid-size data analysis. StatsModels is yet another library which helps in statistical modeling, testing, and analysis.

Graphical User Interface/strong:

Python has support for multiple cross-platform frameworks. The common frameworks like Kivy, PyQt, gui2Py, libavg, and wxPython are widely accepted by the Python graphical user interface development community. To explain further:

  • Kivy is a very powerful cross-platform GUI development library which includes the native multi-touch feature for Android and iOS platform. It's an event-driven framework and largely implemented for game-based development. It handles everything from widgets to animations.

  • PyQt is a multi-licensed cross-platform framework. It has a very comprehensive library of tools and APIs which support multiple platforms, including mobile.

  • PyGUI – As compared to Kivy and PyQt, PyGUI is relatively simpler and exclusively runs on Unix, Macintosh, and Windows platforms. This MVC-based framework focuses on blending easily into the Python ecosystem.

  • Libavg is a third-party library which has features like event handling, timers, and logging capability. Libavg is an open source library and it runs on Linux, Macintosh, and Windows. It has a wide range of features such as a layout engine that can support several objects like text, images, and videos.

  • wxPython is based on wxWidgets, a cross-platform GUI library developed using C++. The key feature of WxPython is its 2D path drawing API. It also supports multiple file formats and text-editing and word-processing widgets.

Software Build Automation

Build automation is the process of compiling source code into binary code automatically. SCons is an open source next-generation build system that provides faster, easier, and more reliable way to build software. SCons is written in Python and has a modular build engine which helps to solve a number of problems associated with build automation and can also be embedded in other software. SCons also supports building code from the central source code repositories and pre-built targets. It has a built-in support for fetching source files from several version control systems. It also supports parallel builds and cross-platform builds.

Software Test Automation:

Selenium, which is a portable software testing framework for web applications, supports Python language by providing client APIs for it. Python can help in the automation of tasks such as preparation of test data, analysis of data etc. There are several python test automation frameworks, tools, libraries and software such as unit test, Sancho, testify, grail etc. which can help in effective test automation.

Considering the various applications of Python, it is hardly surprising to see that well-known globally used applications such as BitTorrent, YouTube, and Dropbox, are based on Python.