Introduction to Python

Python was founded by Guido van Rossum. Guido began writing a compiler for Python around Christmas 1989. The name Python comes from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Guido’s beloved show. He hoped the new language, called Python, would meet his vision of creating a fully functional, easy-to-learn, extensible language between C and the shell.

In the latest TIOBE rankings, Python overtook PHP at number 4. Python is an excellent and widely used language that values beauty, clarity, and simplicity.

Python can be used for data analysis, component integration, network services, image processing, numerical computation, and scientific computing. Python is now used by almost all large and medium-sized Internet companies in the industry, such as Youtube, Dropbox, BT, Quora, Douban, Zhihu, Google, Yahoo! , Facebook, NASA, Baidu, Tencent, Autohome, Meituan, etc.

The main areas of Python today

  1. WEB development — Django, the most popular Python WEB framework, supports asynchronous and highly concurrent Tornado framework, Flask, Bottle, Django The framework for Perfectionism with Merit is defined as the framework for perfectionist with Merit.
  2. Network Programming – The Twisted network framework supports high concurrency, and Asyncio introduced by Py3 makes asynchronous programming very easy
  3. Crawlers – Python dominates the crawler world, Scrapy, Request, BeautifuSoap, urllib, and so on
  4. Cloud computing – The most popular and well-known cloud computing framework is OpenStack, and Python’s current popularity is largely due to cloud computing
  5. AI – Who will be the first development language in the ERA of AI and big data? This should have been a matter beyond debate. If three years ago, Matlab, Scala, R, Java, and Python were all in the running, then three years later, the trend is very clear, especially after Facebook opened source PyTorch two days ago. Python’s position as the top language in the AGE of AI is pretty well established, and it’s only a matter of who comes in second.
  6. Automated operations – ask every operations person in China what languages must operations people speak? Ten people are sure to give you the same answer, and it’s called Python
  7. Financial Analysis — When I was in the financial industry 10 years ago,Python was used for many analysis programs and high-frequency trading software written by our company. So far,Python is the most widely used language in financial analysis and quantitative trading
  8. Scientific computing — Did you know that NASA has been using Python extensively for complex scientific calculations since 1997, and with the development of NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, Enthought Librarys, and many other libraries, Making Python increasingly suitable for doing scientific calculations and drawing high-quality 2D and 3D images. In contrast to Matlab, the most popular commercial software in scientific computing, Python is a general-purpose programming language with a wider range of applications than the scripting language used by Matlab
  9. Game development — Python also has many uses for online game development. Compared to Lua or C++,Python has a higher level of abstraction than Lua and can describe game business logic in less code. Python is better suited as a Host language than Lua, meaning that the entry point of programs is better on the Python side. Then write extensions in C/C++ if necessary. Python is great for writing projects with more than 10,000 lines of code, and it’s good for keeping online games under 100,000 lines of code. As far as I know, the famous game Civilization was written in Python

3. Python applications in some companies

  • Google: Projects like Google App Engine, code.google.com, Google Earth, Google Crawlers, Google Ads, and more are all heavily developed in Python
  • CIA: The CIA website was developed in Python
  • NASA: NASA makes extensive use of Python for data analysis and computation
  • YouTube: YouTube, the world’s largest video site, was developed in Python
  • Dropbox handles 1 billion file uploads and downloads a day
  • Instagram is the largest photo-sharing social network in the US. Over 30 million photos are shared every day, all developed in Python
  • Facebook: A lot of the base libraries are implemented in Python
  • Redhat: The YUM package management tool in the world’s most popular Linux distributions is developed in Python
  • Douban: Almost all of our business is developed in Python
  • Zhihu: The largest Q&A community in China, developed by Python (Quora abroad)
  • Chunyu Doctor: The famous online medical website in China is developed with Python
  • In addition to the above, there are sohu, Kingsoft, Tencent, Shanda, netease, Baidu, Ali, Taobao, Tudou, Sina, Guoku and other companies using Python to complete a variety of tasks.

The history of Python

Guido began writing a compiler for Python in 1989.

In 1991, the first Python compiler was created. It is implemented in C language and can call C language library files. Since its birth, Python has had classes, functions, exception handling, core data types including tables and dictionaries, and an extended system based on modules.

Granddaddy of Python web frameworks, Zope 1 was released in 1999

Python 1.0 – January 1994 added lambda, Map, Filter and Reduce.

Python 2.0 – October 16, 2000 – added a memory reclamation mechanism that forms the basis of the current Python language framework

Python 2.4 – November 30, 2004, the same year that Django, by far the most popular WEB framework, was born

Python 2.5 – September 19, 2006

Python 2.6 – October 1, 2008

Python 2.7 – July 3, 2010

In November 2014, it was announced that Python 2.7 would be supported until 2020, And reaffirmed that there would be no 2.8 release as users were expected to move to Python 3.4+ as soon as possible

Python 3.0 – December 3, 2008 (Why was 3.0 released in 2008 and 2.7 released in 2010? Because 3.0 is not backward compatible with 2.0, so everyone refused to upgrade 3.0, but the official release of 2.7 interim version)

Python 3.1 – June 27, 2009

Python 3.2 – February 20, 2011

Python 3.3 – September 29, 2012

Python 3.4 – March 16, 2014

Python 3.5 – September 13, 2015

Python 3.6-2016-12-23 Python3.6.0 release

What kinds of Python are there?

Cpython,Ipython,PyPy,Jpython,IronPython