Python may be your safest bet for a career in coding – Gadgets Now

Whether you are looking to add a new programming language to your skillset, or to venture into coding, Python is today the safest bet.

Python is a high-level language, but its more like the English you speak and write. If you read a snippet of code in Python, its easy to figure out the intention behind the code, what the algorithm is trying to do. This makes Python very easy to learn, says Nabarun Pal, an infrastructure engineer and one of the key organisers of PyCon India (Python Conference) 2020, due in October. Nabarun and Sayan Chowdhury, a Linux software engineer and PyCon chair, were our guests at the eleventh edition of Times Techies Webinars.

Python, which broke into the tech scene around the early 90s, is free and open source. But its current chartbuster status owes a lot to the community of developers and the vast collection of libraries (packages) that can be fitted into any problem you are trying to solve. Python has a huge universe of libraries or packages. If you are building a web application, you have Django and Flask, suiting different purposes. Similarly, packages are available for desktop, infrastructure and mobile applications, and for data science, visualisation, research and machine learning. Micropython and Circuitpython let you tinker with hardware, says Pal.

Pal and Chowdhury say this sets Python apart from most other languages, which are useful for specific purposes. R, for instance, is great for data science, but not for much else.

Python drives a range of activities in AI. For data science, some of the most powerful libraries are Pandas, Jupyter and Numpy, which are designed for heavy duty tasks. There are also packages for visualisation, besides the machine learning packages like Keras, Tensorflow and Pytorch.

If you are looking to build something faster, Python is the ideal choice. Instagram is a famous example. From image processing to infrastructure to ML, Python can practically do everything for you, says Chowdhury. Companies that use a lot of Python include Nasa, Uber, Facebook, YouTube, PayPal, Reddit and Pinterest.

Academia too uses a lot of Python. The popular packages used for research, say, for molecular analysis, are MDanalysis, Astropy and SunPy.

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Python may be your safest bet for a career in coding - Gadgets Now