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Python Series Post 2 - Features, Applications, Advantages, Disadvantages of Python


Features of Python


1. Easy:- Here Easy refers to different contexts like Easy to code, Easy to read, Easy to Learn, Easy to Maintain.

2. Free:- Yes, it’s Freely available and you can download from official python website.

3. Open Source:- From Open Source, we mean its source code is available to the public. You can download it, change it, use it, and distribute it according to your requirements

4. Expressive:- Python focus on the solution than on syntax which makes it as Expressive language.

5. Object-Oriented:- It focuses on objects and combines data and functions. Contrarily, a procedure-oriented language revolves around functions, which are code that can be reused. Python supports both procedure-oriented and object-oriented programming

6. GUI Programming Support/ Interactive:- Python offers various libraries for making Graphical User Interface for your applications. For this, you can use Tkinter, wxPython or JPython.

7. High-Level Language:- There is no need to remember the system architecture. Nor any need to manage the memory. hence makes python Programmer-Friendly.

8. Extensible:- If needed, you can write some of your Python code in other languages like C++. This makes Python an Extensible language which means, it can be extended to other languages.

9. Portable language/ Cross-platform Language:- You can run the same python code on different Operating Systems(Windows, Mac, Linux). This makes Python a Portable language. However, you must avoid any system-dependent features in this case.

10. Database Connect:- It’s easy to connect with large set of Database available.

11. Scalable:- Python provides a better structure and support for large programs than shell scripting, which defines its Scalable feature.

12. Integrated language:- Python is also an Integrated language because we can easily Integrate python with other language like c, c++ etc.

13. Interpreted Language:- In Python, there is no need to compile it. Internally, its source code is converted into an immediate form called byte-code. So all you need to do is to run your Python code without worrying about linking to libraries. By interpreted, we mean the source code is executed line by line, and not all at once. Because of this, it is easier to debug your code.

14. Large/Broad Standard Library:- You don’t have to write your own code for every single thing. There are Libraries for regular expressions, unit-testing, web browsers, threading, databases, CGI, email, image manipulation, and a lot of other functionalities.

15. Dynamically Typed:- This means that the type for a value is decided at runtime, not in advance. This is why we don’t need to specify the type of data while declaring it which makes python as Dynamically Typed.

16. Embeddable:- It is possible to put our Python code in different language like C++. This allows us to integrate scripting capabilities into our program of the other language.

17. Automatic Garbage Collection:- Frees you from having to manually allocate and free memory in your code.

18. Advanced programming features such as Generators and List Comprehensions.

Applications of Python

1. GUI Based Desktop Applications:-

(a) Image Processing and Graphic Design Applications

(b) Scientific and Computational/Numerical Applications:- A lot of scientists, researchers, programmers, and statisticians use Python for scientific and numeric calculations. There are lot of libraries available for Scientific and numeric calculations.

Some of these are:

· SciPy

· Pandas

· IPython

· Numpy

© Game development:- It is widely used in the development of games, including GUI, through libraries like PyGame.

The platform-independent GUI toolkit that you can use are:

· wxWidgets

· Tkinter

· Qt

· Gtk+

· FLTK

· Kivy

· OpenGL

(d) 3D Graphics:- You can create 3D graphics with Python OpenGL and Blender 3d API.

If you like game development, then you should check out PyWeek which hosts interesting gaming contests.

2. Web frameworks and Web Applications:- Developers can perform server-side programming through Python libraries like Django and Flask. The standard library of Python supports many internet protocols like:

· HTML

· JSON and XML

· Email processing

· FTP and IMAP

· Socket interface.

3. Enterprise and Business Applications:- Python has fantastic features like special libraries, scalability, extensibility, and simplicity. Larger applications can be easily customized using Python. A popular website Reddit which was originally written in Common Lisp was rewritten with Python in 2005. Youtube, NASA also uses Python for some of its functionalities.

Python is a great choice for developing ERP and E-commerce systems.

· Tryton – A three-tier, high-level general-purpose application platform.

· Odoo – It’s an all-rounder management software with a range of business applications. With that, it forms a complete suite of enterprise-management applications in-effect.

4. Operating System Development:- Operating System can also be developed with the help of python language

5. Language Development:- We can develop languages or rewrite earlier developed languages with the help of python. Example:-A popular website Reddit which was originally written in Common Lisp was rewritten with Python in 2005.

6. Prototyping:- Through Python, developers can create quick prototypes to present to the client.

7. Data Science and Machine Learning:- Python is the best and most commonly used language for machine learning and data science. Because it has a great community and a vast range of libraries, Python aids a great deal to application development in the field of data science. It has libraries available for data manipulation, data visualization, data cleaning, and several other related functionalities. Some of the important libraries for data science are:

· Numpy

· Tensorflow

· Keras

· Pandas

· Scikit-learn

· Matplotlib

8. Software Development:- In software development, Python is mostly used as a support language for building control and management, testing and automating the workflow. Like

· SCons – build-control.

· Buildbot and Apache Gump – automation and continuous compilation and testing.

· Roundup or Trac – project management and bug-tracking.

· Tools like Selenium can be used with Python for testing web applications.

9. Education:- Python is the most preferred language for beginners and for teaching purposes. It is a good choice to learn about programming and computer science concepts.

10. Network Programming:- Python is also used in making connections between client and server, socket programming and network programming. It supports lower-level network programming.

· Twisted Python – Framework for asynchronous network programming.

· Easy to use socket interface for socket programming.

11.Database Access:- Python is used for connecting with databases. Python is also used in server-side programming where it connects to SQL or NoSQL databases and performs database operations. Some of the libraries for working with databases are:

· PyMySQL – to work with MySQL database.

· PyMongo – to work with MongoDB NoSQL database.

Advantages/Benefits/Pros of Python

1. Presence of Third Party Modules:- The Python Package Index (PyPI) contains numerous third-party modules that makes Python capable of interacting with most of the other languages and platforms making it more flexible.

2. Extensive Support Libraries:- Python provides a large standard library which includes areas like internet protocols, string operations, web services tools and operating system interfaces. Many high use programming tasks have already been scripted into the standard library which helps to reduce length of code to be written significantly.

3. Open Source and Community Development(or Affordable):- Python language is developed under an OSI-approved open source license, which makes it free to use and distribute, including for commercial purposes. Therefore individuals and organizations can leverage the free available resources to build large number of applications

Further, its development is driven by the community which collaborates for its code through hosting conferences and mailing lists.

4. Learning Ease:- Python offers excellent readability and simple-to-learn syntax which helps beginners to utilize this programming language. The code style guidelines, PEP 8, provide a set of rules to facilitate the formatting of code.

With most of the programming languages their learning curves tends to grow parabolic with time that means it is hard to grasp early but as soon you become familiar with this language the learning becomes easy. But in case of python the learning is easy because of easy syntax and short hand writing.

5. User-friendly Data Structures:- Python has built-in list and dictionary data structures which can be used to construct fast runtime data structures. Further, Python also provides the option of dynamic high-level data typing which reduces the length of support code that is needed.

6. Productivity and Speed:- Python has clean object-oriented design which provides enhanced process control capabilities and possesses strong integration and text processing capabilities and its own unit testing framework, all of which contribute to the increase in its speed and productivity. Python is considered a viable option for building complex multi-protocol network applications.

7. Driven By Vast And Active Community:- Python has one of the most known and active community which helps them in continuous improvement of the python.

8. Integration Feature:- Python integrates the Enterprise Application Integration that makes it easy to develop Web services by invoking COM or COBRA components. It has powerful control capabilities as it calls directly through C, C++ or Java via Python. Python also processes XML and other markup languages as it can run on all modern operating systems through same byte code.

9. Improved Programmer’s Productivity:- The language has extensive support libraries and clean object-oriented designs that increase two to ten fold of programmer’s productivity while using the languages like Java, Perl, C, C++ and C#.

10. Higher Application Productivity:- With its strong process integration features, unit testing framework and enhanced control capabilities contribute towards the increased speed for most applications and productivity of applications. It is a great option for building scalable multi-protocol network applications.

11. Reduces Maintenance Cost:- Owing to its simplicity, Python makes application maintenance easier and, thus, reduces the costs involved, which is a massive advantage.

12. Avoid the Harms from Software Bugs:- Python doesn't let a code bug initiate a segmentation fault within the application. Due to this, it is considered to be a preferred language for development purpose.

13. Wide Applicability:- Another essential feature of this language is that it is widely applicable. Engineers, scientists, and mathematicians broadly use it.

14. Memory Management:- Python has a vast library with memory management capabilities, and this makes it stand out from the other programming languages. It includes a private heap containing all Python objects and data structures and a built-in memory manager to maintain this private heap.

15. Asynchronous Coding:- Asynchronous coding uses a single event loop to complete a job in small intervals. Python is very useful for writing asynchronous code because it is easy to write and maintain. It doesn't require any complex research contentions, deadlocks, or any other complexity.


Limitations/Disadvantages/Cons of Python

1. Difficulty in Using Other Languages:- The Python lovers become so accustomed to its large set of features and its extensive libraries, so they face problem in learning or working on other programming languages. Python experts may see the declaring of cast “values” or variable “types”, syntactic requirements of adding curly braces or semi colons as an onerous task.

2. Weak in Mobile Computing:- Python has made its presence on many desktop and server platforms, but it is seen as a weak language for mobile computing. That’s the main reason very few mobile applications are built in it like Carbonnelle.

3. Gets Slow in Speed:- Python executes with the help of an interpreter instead of the compiler, which causes it to slow down because compilation and execution help it to work normally. On the other hand, it can be seen that it is fast for many web applications too.

4. Run-time Errors/ Error Detection in Codes:- The Python language is dynamically typed so it has many design restrictions that are reported by some Python Developers. It is even seen that it requires more testing time, and the errors show up when the applications are finally run.

Also because of dynamically typed language nature, data type of a variable can change anytime. A variable containing integer number may hold a string in the future, which can lead to Runtime Errors. Therefore, Python programmers need to perform thorough testing of the applications.

5. Underdeveloped Database Access Layers:- As compared to the popular technologies like JDBC and ODBC, the Python’s database access layer is found to be bit underdeveloped and primitive. . It is, therefore, not considered suitable if developers are looking for a smooth interaction of complex legacy data.

6. Large Memory Consumption:- Python design structure is such that it uses large memory while processing as compared to other languages as C/C++. This language is not suitable to use for development under limited memory restrictions.

7. Error Detection in Codes:- Since python uses interpreter the error in codes does not come up during code compiling. Python uses dynamically typed variables which makes testing more hectic. All these errors came out to be a run-time error which no developers want in their program. This makes python less usable for GUI applets developments.

8. Not Suitable for Game Development:- Python is mostly used in desktop and web server-side development. It is not considered ideal for game development due to the consumption of more memory and its slow processing speed while compared to other programming languages.

9. Developer's Restrictions:- Once a developer gets used to the ease and simplicity of this language, it becomes difficult for them to switch back to other languages.

10. Design Restrictions:- One of the significant issues of Python is its design restrictions. The reason behind this constraint is that Python is dynamically typed.

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References:-

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Didn't go through Python Series Post 1,Here you go with the following URL:-

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