Python is becoming more and more popular quite literally with each day. If you have been searching for some reasons why to choose exactly this programming language for your software engineering career, this is probably the right place for you.
Here are 4 impressive facts about Python that could help you with your decision-making process:
- The number of Python users is growing tremendously
A recent study shows that Python is among the top 5 most popular programming languages of the new era. Another study, conducted by Stack Overflow in 2017, shows that approximately 32% of the developers use Python, and another 20% intend to start using it in the near future.
An interesting fact is that in the Stack Overflow developer community there are over 1 100 000 questions asked about Python, which says a lot about the language’s popularity.
- There are Python packages for everything!
Over 147 000 packages are available in the so-called “Cheese Shop” (the index is named after an episode of the TV series “Monty Python’s flying circus”, which was the inspiration for the language’s name as well). The huge number of packages in the repository is what makes the language so popular and flexible. This is also what makes Python suitable for web development, data science, and even game development or DevOps without the need to start from scratch and write your own code every time. GitHub’s situation is very similar as well – there are over half a million repositories there that use Python.
- Python and Data Science
As I mentioned in the previous paragraph – Python is also suitable for Data Science, which is the first step towards Machine Learning and AI. Google’s project TensorFlow is amongst the most forked projects at GitHub (from “Fork” – making a copy of an existing project and building a new one using the same base). Combined with other libraries like Scikit-learn and Keras, you get a solid base for the development of AI while you also have flexibility and ease of use for everyone who knows how to work with Python. The fact that these libraries exist is extremely important because they allow the programmers to focus on developing and improving what they already have, instead of starting everything from scratch every time.
- Impressive statistics
A study of a popular economy media shows that nearly 40% of the American schools offer Python programs to their students, which is impressive, especially compared to the 10% from 2013! Here is another interesting fact – in 2015 in the UK 6 out of every 10 parents directed their children towards learning the Python language instead of French!
