Learn Python in One Hour: Programming by Example

Why Python?

In a world of ever-increasing scripting and language platforms, why choose Python, a legacy system that has been in development on-and-off for nearly two dozen years? Quite simply, it provides a design philosophy that emphasizes code readability without sacrificing a compact and powerful expression of ideas. Going back as far as 1959 with the introduction of COBOL, people have been trying to produce a programming system that is readable, which is to say it does not lend itself to obscuring details or requiring intense concentration to figure out the meaning of a line of code. As any student of computer science can tell you, the problem with COBOL was it couldn’t get out of its own way—it went too far down the path of simplicity and its lack of easy-to-use data structures hurt it the most. The remainder of third-generation languages, such as C, C++, Pascal, and I would even argue Java, were marred by the lack of a concise and powerful string handling system as well as tedious ways to manage collections (lists, dictionaries, sets, and so on).

It cannot be over-emphasized how important basic string handling is in developing modern programs that interface with the textual world of the web, especially unstyled documents (i.e. plain text). Simple things such as concatenation, regular expressions, and splitting and joining strings must be effortless or else they become onerous. Such was the appeal of Perl for many years. In fact, many people will speak of Perl-and-Python in a single breath since they so often occupy the same solution-space. However, the two languages diverge on a few key principles. Specifically, in Perl there are many ways to perform even the simplest operations due to its many operators and ability to nest them in ever-more-complex expressions. In Python, there is generally one way to do something, which means it is both easy to understand and manipulate.