What is Python? Advantages & Features

What is Python?

Python is a powerful high-level, general-purpose programming language in the Software industry. It is the interpreted language that mainly focuses on code simplicity and readability. It supports multiple programming paradigms, includes procedural, object-oriented and imperative programming approaches.

Being dynamically typed language, you need not declare types of each variable, that addresses the fewer lines of code. Thus, the developers find Python very easy and simple language and that's why they are more attracted to it.

Python Advantages & Features

• Easy to learn and code: In Python, it is very easy to code in comparison with other languages. For example, if you want to print "Hello World", in java, you have to make a class for that, but in Python, you just need to write print. It is very easy to learn and understand. Therefore, when a person starts python after Java or C, he/she finds very easy to code in it.
• Extensive Libraries: The amazing feature of using Python is that it comes with an extensive library. These include areas like web service tools, string operations, Internet and protocols. They already contain code for many objectives like databases, unit testing, web browsers, CGI and many more. So, developers don't have to write the code for these manually.
• Productivity: The language features and its extensive libraries make it more productive than other languages like Java, C, C++, etc. The unit testing framework, enhanced control capabilities and similar functionalities shift towards the increased speed for many applications. It is worthy to say here some things come with small packets with big bangs the same as writing less code and get more work done.
• Interpreted Language: In python, statements are executed one by one, therefore it is very easy to debug the errors and anomalies.
• Widely applicable: An important benefit is it is widely accepted, and largely used by many developers at a high level, scientists and mathematicians. Nowadays, it is highly used for producing animations for movies and in projects of machine learning. This is the reason, why it is so popular, and extensively used for prototyping and in experiments too.
• IoT opportunities: Since new platforms like Raspberry Pi are growing in the industry at a vast pace, thus, IOT also finds a bright future. Python is the basis of these platforms, and this is the best way to connect the language with the real world.
• Integration: Since Python integrates the Enterprise applications easily, that enables it to develop web services by calling COBRA or COM components. Even, you can run it on all modern operating systems with the same byte code. Therefore, it also processes XML and other markup languages like HTML, PHP, etc.
• Mix Paradigms: Python is known as a hybrid paradigm as it supports both object-oriented and procedural approach. With functions, it enables code reusability, and with classes and objects, it let us model the real world.

Disadvantages of Python

• Weak Mobile computing: Although Python has shown its performance in web and server platforms, it is unable to prove itself in mobile applications. It is an excellent server-side language, but not a good client-side language. The one mobile application built with it is Carbonnelle.
• Simplicity: It is an important feature that considers an advantage as well as disadvantage. The developers who only depend on Python finds difficult to use other languages. As python becomes their second nature, so they are unable to learn languages that are tougher and stiff than it.
• Dynamically typed: As we know, it is dynamically typed language which means we don't need to declare the type of variables while writing the code. But this creates the problem as it can show many run times errors after the final run. Also, this increases the testing time and slows down the speed of processing.
• Database access layer: Like other databases JDBC, ODBC, Python has a bit underdeveloped database access layer. Therefore, it can’t be applied in the enterprises where huge data required.

Difference Between Python and Java

Major Difference Between Python and Java programming language are

Python	Java
Python is a dynamically-typed general-purpose programming language.	Java is a statically typed general-purpose programming language.
The syntax is easy to learn and understand	The syntax of Java is quite complicated
Python is interpreted language, so the speed is quite low to execute the code.	Java has compiled language, so the speed is more than python.
It favors Machine learning, IoT and Artificial Intelligence.	It is more popular for web and mobile applications.
Python is very flexible and simple	While Java has hard rules to follow, that makes it stiff.
It allows developers to be more productive by allowing them to write code in fewer lines.	As developers have to declare variable types that are very time consuming, it makes it less productive.