Python History and Versions
o Python laid its foundation in the late 1980s.
o The implementation of Python was started in the December 1989 by Guido Van Rossum at CWI in
Netherland.
o In February 1991, van Rossum published the code (labeled version 0.9.0) to alt.sources.
o In 1994, Python 1.0 was released with new features like: lambda, map, filter, and reduce.
o Python 2.0 added new features like: list comprehensions, garbage collection system.
o On December 3, 2008, Python 3.0 (also called "Py3K") was released. It was designed to rectify
fundamental flaw of the language.
o ABC programming language is said to be the predecessor of Python language which was capable of
Exception Handling and interfacing with Amoeba Operating System.
o Python is influenced by following programming languages:
o ABC language.
o Modula-3
Python Features
Python provides lots of features that are listed below.
1) Easy to Learn and Use
Python is easy to learn and use. It is developer-friendly and high level programming language.
2) Expressive Language
Python language is more expressive means that it is more understandable and readable.
3) Interpreted Language
Python is an interpreted language i.e. interpreter executes the code line by line at a time. This makes debugging
easy and thus suitable for beginners.
4) Cross-platform Language
Python can run equally on different platforms such as Windows, Linux, Unix and Macintosh etc. So, we can say
that Python is a portable language.
5) Free and Open Source
Python language is freely available at offical web address.The source-code is also available. Therefore it is open
source.
6) Object-Oriented Language
Python supports object oriented language and concepts of classes and objects come into existence.
7) Extensible
It implies that other languages such as C/C++ can be used to compile the code and thus it can be used further in
our python code.
8) Large Standard Library
Python has a large and broad library and prvides rich set of module and functions for rapid application
development.
9) GUI Programming Support
Graphical user interfaces can be developed using Python.
10) Integrated
It can be easily integrated with languages like C, C++, JAVA etc.
Python Applications
Python is known for its general purpose nature that makes it applicable in almost each domain of software
development. Python as a whole can be used in any sphere of development.
Here, we are specifing applications areas where python can be applied.
1) Web Applications
We can use Python to develop web applications. It provides libraries to handle internet protocols such as HTML
and XML, JSON, Email processing, request, beautifulSoup, Feedparser etc. It also provides Frameworks such as
Django, Pyramid, Flask etc to design and delelop web based applications. Some important developments are:
PythonWikiEngines, Pocoo, PythonBlogSoftware etc.
2) Desktop GUI Applications
Python provides Tk GUI library to develop user interface in python based application. Some other useful
toolkits wxWidgets, Kivy, pyqt that are useable on several platforms. The Kivy is popular for writing multitouch
applications.
3) Software Development
Python is helpful for software development process. It works as a support language and can be used for build
control and management, testing etc.
4) Scientific and Numeric
Python is popular and widely used in scientific and numeric computing. Some useful library and package are
SciPy, Pandas, IPython etc. SciPy is group of packages of engineering, science and mathematics.
5) Business Applications
Python is used to build Bussiness applications like ERP and e-commerce systems. Tryton is a high level
application platform.
6) Console Based Application
We can use Python to develop console based applications. For example: IPython.
7) Audio or Video based Applications
Python is awesome to perform multiple tasks and can be used to develop multimedia applications. Some of real
applications are: TimPlayer, cplay etc.
8) 3D CAD Applications
To create CAD application Fandango is a real application which provides full features of CAD.
9) Enterprise Applications
Python can be used to create applications which can be used within an Enterprise or an Organization. Some real
time applications are: OpenErp, Tryton, Picalo etc.
10) Applications for Images
Using Python several application can be developed for image. Applications developed are: VPython, Gogh,
imgSeek etc.
There are several such applications which can be developed using Python
