Python has gained popularity, especially in recent years from tech giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and academia. Many computer science students pick up Python as their intro programming language and love using it, especially if you compare Python with languages like Java or C and C++, which traditionally were the only languages taught in four-year programs at colleges. Python’s first release came almost three decades ago, but it used a lot of fewer lines of code to express the exact same logic since the very beginning. Its main objective was to provide code readability and at the same time, advanced developer productivity, and as of recent years, it has caught even more popularity, especially in the fields like data science and applied math.
In this blog, I will talk about many reasons why you should learn Python.
Reasons to Learn Python
1. Simple and Easy to Learn
Python is simple and syntax friendly. Python’s creator, Guido van Rossum, had a clear vision for it: “Make it as simple to understand as plain English”. In retrospect, this might have been a little too optimistic. Nevertheless, Python aims to emphasize readability and the use of significant whitespace. In other words, it strives to be as close to the human language as possible. So, it’s no surprise that it didn’t take long before people came to love Python because of its syntax and dynamic typing nature, making it extremely easy to master even for individuals without a technical background.
It is very simple for you to understand the syntax of Python. If you take an example of writing a hello world program that is the first program that every single person writes in Python versus in java, you will understand how exactly everything is working. In Python, you just write print hello world versus if you were to write the same thing in java, you would have to write something like public static void main and all, and that can be difficult for people who are new to programming to understand in the first day itself. So that is why I think it is very easy for anyone to understand Python in the first attempt itself.
2. Rich Set of Libraries
One of the reasons why Python’s popularity is growing so rapidly and is adopted by so many organizations, is that it is an open-source language that allows you to take advantage of the extremely rich set of libraries. Python libraries do all the heavy lifting for you. Whatever the topic, there is an already existing Python library in most cases, and all you need to know is how to use it. Sounds pretty good, right? At the same time, if you would like to, Python gives you the flexibility to develop some custom functionalities on your own as it is a general-purpose language.
3. Extensive Online Documentation
Python has extensive online documentation. Python was first released in 1991. Since then, the language has kept adapting to the latest advancements. However, with an increasing number and depth of Python libraries, documentation became more and more important. Fortunately, Python is very neatly documented and most of its libraries have accompanying documentation allowing you to start quickly. For many libraries, you will even find example code, where you can see the functions implemented. So, reading the documentation is a good way to actually learn Python and become better at it at any stage of your learning process.
4. Huge and Active Community
An Awesome community Python is an open-source language, meaning it’s free to use and everyone can contribute to the writing and maintenance of its code and libraries. Indeed, a lot of people, and even companies, have dedicated time and effort to expand and perfect this programming language. As a matter of fact, a big part of what makes Python so attractive is the amazing community. There are many active groups and forums for Python, which is always very useful if you get stuck with something while coding and need some advice. This is especially helpful to new users.
There are almost 8.2 million developers as of today who know the Python language. Now, these stats can be vague, but it gives you an idea about how many people are learning Python. Now you might be thinking that there are so many people learning Python why should i learn Python right now, doesn’t it mean that the market is saturated? I don’t think that is true. Firstly, I think you should be happy about this growing python number because whenever you have some error, whenever you have some bug in your python code, you can just simply search it up on stack overflow or some other website and there would be a lot of developers that had the same issue that you had, and so it would be very simple for you to find out a solution to your problem. Secondly, just because there are so many people that are learning Python, the support for this language would be for a lot of time and you would be getting some new updates every now and then.
5. Diverse Python Applications
With Python in your toolbox, you can be a Software Engineer, Python Developer, Automation tester, Data Analyst, Data scientist and many other jobs related to scripting. Python is just about everywhere these days, which makes it very special and unique. Of course, these roles require other skills on top of Python proficiency, but it is a great starting point.
Once you have learned Python, you can implement it on a lot of applications. Talking about the applications, the most prominent one is going to be machine learning and data science. Whenever someone is learning data science or machine learning, their go-to language is Python. Python in data science offers you some modules like you have numpy, pandas, matplotlib, sklearn, scipy and by using all of these modules, it is very simple for you to just take up some data set and make some model out of it and predict something. That is why data science and machine learning is actually a big application of Python. If you want to get into machine learning, you can take a look at TensorFlow and PyTorch. Another important application of Python would actually be web development. You can very simply just use Django and Flask to create some back-end of a website and use Python to do that. There are several other applications as well, you can make virtual assistants, you can do some automation as well, you can also create your own games with the help of PyGame, you can also use the Turtle module and Tkinter to create some GUI (graphical user Interfaces), you can also do web scraping as well. So, there are a lot of applications of Python.
6. Low Development Time
Let us say you have to print a program that prints out Fibonacci numbers in Python versus if you were to do that in java or some other language, you would find out that it’s very simple for you to implement something in python right versus in java or some other language like C++ or others. Now there is a lot of abstraction going on in Python, a lot of the things that you would not see on the surface is hidden behind the curtains. That means you can just write some code very quickly and you can experiment with it. If you were to implement some kind of algorithm in Python versus in some other language, you would understand that Python is just very simple. You can start writing the code and it would be very much less when compared to some other programming languages.
7. Opportunities with Python
If you are good at Python programming, you have great options to earn high salaries. There are multiple organizations who would pay you the amount you ask for, if you have the Python skills they are looking for. Senior Python developers are one of the highest paid professionals in US. If you take a look at the salary of an average python developer in the US, it is about $80K per annum which is really good for a fresher who is just coming out of college and you can also take a look at some internships, you can take a look at freelancing. There are multiple internships available in AI-based start-ups where you can learn to implement machine learning models. There are plenty of job openings also worldwide for Python developers across all levels of experience. So overall, there are a lot of opportunities for a python developer.
8. Python for Testing
A lot of QA engineers consider Python programming as their best choice for testing website applications and other web interfaces to avoid any bug or error before launching something on the live site. Python offers a built-in testing framework called PyUnit, which helps testers write multiple test cases with ease to make sure that the developer’s code works as expected. The Python unite tests are also used for test collection, test aggregation and test reporting. So, when it comes to testing and validating an application, Python is really a good choice. It has all the necessary testing frameworks to debug and speed up the workflows. It supports both cross-browser and cross-platform testing with frameworks like PyTest and Robot. It also has multiple other testing frameworks such as Behave, UnitTest, Lettuce.
9. Python for Scripting
Python is not just a programming language, it is also a scripting language. Scripting languages are mostly used for automating few tasks and Python is really good at it. As a scripting language, Python does not require any compilation, it is directly interpreted at runtime. You create a python script with .py extension, write your Python code, and execute it to automate your mundane tasks. Once your script is error-free, you can use the same script multiple times to execute the same tasks.
10. Big Companies using Python
In Python, there is a tremendous amount of jobs available out there, especially since all of these tech giants are adapting to Python’s language. Netflix uses it to recommend movies and tv shows and documentaries based on your history and Google uses it to enhance their search engine capabilities, Uber uses it for a good part of their back end and Dropbox uses it for their infrastructure and operations in general. Python is a language that many types of organizations can use. Whether you are working for a tech giant like Google to build a worldwide application or a small start-up, Python will help you build next-generation products of all kinds.
Final thoughts
Python has received tremendous popularity and it has a seemingly untouchable reputation among developers and programmers. It has constantly proven its worth in the industry and why it is the best programming language currently. If you are in the IT domain developing applications or even a newbie planning to learn to program, Python is the best choice for you. I have listed all the important reasons in this blog which tells why you must learn Python. I hope this blog helped you in understanding why you should learn Python. So, start learning Python now and give a boost to your career.
