What can you do with Python? 5 real-world Python applications
The word is out on Python. The simplicity, limitless range of external libraries, and committed community of Pythonistas are fundamentals of Python that even a beginner developer has probably heard before. These features have also distinguished Python as the most used programming language in the world, currently [1] .
You’re not here to learn all the reasons why you should learn Python as either your first introduction to coding or your next learning endeavor in a long line of languages. You’re here to be shown why learning Python is worth your time based on the career and project you see in your future. For our purposes, It helps to view Python as a tool. We’ll explore not necessarily the tool itself, but rather all that can be built by that tool. It’s pointless to learn how to grip and strike with a hammer if you don’t have an idea of what to do with it once you achieve proficiency. If you don’t know what your future holds just yet, that’s more than OK. Hopefully, the following sections can provide some inspiration through examples. Many major industries and companies are already using Python’s boundless applications to turn their visions into reality.
Python is a versatile and powerful tool that stretches to every corner of our world. The use cases of Python are in everything from Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber to your tedious health care plan. You don’t know Python until you know what it can do.
5 real-world applications of Python
Python code is in everything. The Python-based libraries and modules that can be freely and easily used in any project make certain that the language can be everywhere. Some examples of these libraries are NumPy for machine learning and Pandas for data analysis. Python and its endless list of libraries are things that even the most different industries and companies have in common. As a tool, Python can lead you down any career path that you could dream of. Let’s take a look at just a few examples of where Python thrives.
1. Music
The Python programming language brings you personalized playlists to brighten up your day. Spotify uses Python to support its back-end web development and data science. Have you ever wondered how Spotify knows exactly what to put in your personalized playlists? You can thank the data analysis capabilities of Python. Over 80% of Spotify’s back-end web development and data analysis processes are written in Python.
Spotify is also a vocal and proud member of the Python community, sponsoring large conferences such as PyCon and local groups such as NYC PyLadies. A thriving company like Spotify doesn’t connect its name to a language so enthusiastically unless it performs sensationally. Spotify is always hiring Python developers. If you’ve always pictured yourself working with music while using your favorite programming language, then these are opportunities you should keep an eye out for in the future.
2. Entertainment
You don’t have to write or act to get into the entertainment business. You can code too! Python appears frequently in the entertainment media industry. Industrial Light and Magic, the visual effects company behind films such as Star Wars and Jurassic Park, has been using Python to run its CGI operating systems and lighting automation for decades. And Netflix has been becoming more and more Python-oriented every year. The company depends on Python to run its Cassandra database. Cassandra clusters and modules are used for automation (including the recommendations page that everybody loves), data analytics, and error monitoring.
Metaflow, a Python web framework, is responsible for machine learning projects at Netflix from the prototype to the production stage. The framework handles millions of data points and organizes them among thousands of CPUs. YouTube was also initially built using mostly Python and still heavily uses it today among other languages. Not just exclusive to Netflix, the machine learning abilities of Python are extensively used in our modern entertainment landscape.
What is Python used for? [closed]
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‘how can i apply python to an object?’.. You don’t apply languages to an object. There a languages where you can create objects, they are called ‘object oriented languages’: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming . But I would be very interested what do you mean with object in your question?
How is this not a real question? This clearly a kid new to programming trying to figure out the difference between a web based programming language — such as javascript — that has a very limited and obvious domain and a more general scripting language with a wide and perhaps not so obvious domain. Especially if he’s a windows user he may never have seen Python scripts used anywhere — and therefor have no idea what they are used for. Give this kid a chance to learn, reopen his question and give him some example use domains.
On the basis that «No question is too trivial or too newbie», and it’s programming related, I think is a real question!
@Felix I’m guess he misspoke. Common we all have those moments where we have words or phrases in our heads that make sense while they stay in there — but as soon as they come out of our mouths make no sense. I’m guessing he’s asking how he can apply Python to the more general non-programming meaning of «object». As in, how can he apply Python to anything. Or perhaps he’s thinking of the domain he knows — web programming and asking how he can apply python to a script or markup «object».
@Alcon: I didn’t meant to tease him. But knowing why he phrased it like that might help in understanding his view at programming languages (or Python). Or he edits his question to clarify this sentence after reading my comment. I think both ways are helpful.
2 Answers 2
Python is a dynamic, strongly typed, object oriented, multipurpose programming language, designed to be quick (to learn, to use, and to understand), and to enforce a clean and uniform syntax.
- Python is dynamically typed: it means that you don’t declare a type (e.g. ‘integer’) for a variable name, and then assign something of that type (and only that type). Instead, you have variable names, and you bind them to entities whose type stays with the entity itself. a = 5 makes the variable name a to refer to the integer 5. Later, a = «hello» makes the variable name a to refer to a string containing «hello». Static typed languages would have you declare int a and then a = 5 , but assigning a = «hello» would have been a compile time error. On one hand, this makes everything more unpredictable (you don’t know what a refers to). On the other hand, it makes very easy to achieve some results a static typed languages makes very difficult.
- Python is strongly typed. It means that if a = «5» (the string whose value is ‘5’) will remain a string, and never coerced to a number if the context requires so. Every type conversion in python must be done explicitly. This is different from, for example, Perl or Javascript, where you have weak typing, and can write things like «hello» + 5 to get «hello5» .
- Python is object oriented, with class-based inheritance. Everything is an object (including classes, functions, modules, etc), in the sense that they can be passed around as arguments, have methods and attributes, and so on.
- Python is multipurpose: it is not specialised to a specific target of users (like R for statistics, or PHP for web programming). It is extended through modules and libraries, that hook very easily into the C programming language.
- Python enforces correct indentation of the code by making the indentation part of the syntax. There are no control braces in Python. Blocks of code are identified by the level of indentation. Although a big turn off for many programmers not used to this, it is precious as it gives a very uniform style and results in code that is visually pleasant to read.
- The code is compiled into byte code and then executed in a virtual machine. This means that precompiled code is portable between platforms.
Python can be used for any programming task, from GUI programming to web programming with everything else in between. It’s quite efficient, as much of its activity is done at the C level. Python is just a layer on top of C. There are libraries for everything you can think of: game programming and openGL, GUI interfaces, web frameworks, semantic web, scientific computing.
@obmon: Python dynamic, interpreted nature allows for faster prototyping an order of magnitude above C. So, the answer is, Python is less verbose and development cycles are many times faster compared to C.
@obmon Just a simple (and very personal reason): C is great, but it is complicated. Python sits on top of C and makes things a lot easier. Of course, if you want to learn a really great language, learn C. but if you want to learn a very good programming language and save yourself a little pain, Python is a good thing.
There are tasks where the obvious way of doing something in Python is faster than doing it in C (as to execution times), and basically every task will take less developer time in Python than C.
Why should you learn Python Programming Language?
Python offers a stepping stone into the world of programming. Even though Python Programming Language has been around for 25 years, it is still rising in popularity. Some of the biggest advantage of Python are it’s
- Easy to Read & Easy to Learn
- Very productive or small as well as big projects
- Big libraries for many things
What is Python Programming Language used for?
As a general purpose programming language, Python can be used for multiple things. Python can be easily used for small, large, online and offline projects. The best options for utilizing Python are web development, simple scripting and data analysis. Below are a few examples of what Python will let you do:
Web Development:
You can use Python to create web applications on many levels of complexity. There are many excellent Python web frameworks including, Pyramid, Django and Flask, to name a few.
Data Analysis:
Python is the leading language of choice for many data scientists. Python has grown in popularity, within this field, due to its excellent libraries including; NumPy and Pandas and its superb libraries for data visualisation like Matplotlib and Seaborn.
Machine Learning:
What if you could predict customer satisfaction or analyse what factors will affect household pricing or to predict stocks over the next few days, based on previous years data? There are many wonderful libraries implementing machine learning algorithms such as Scikit-Learn, NLTK and TensorFlow.
Computer Vision:
You can do many interesting things such as Face detection, Color detection while using Opencv and Python.
Internet Of Things With Raspberry Pi:
Raspberry Pi is a very tiny and affordable computer which was developed for education and has gained enormous popularity among hobbyists with do-it-yourself hardware and automation. You can even build a robot and automate your entire home. Raspberry Pi can be used as the brain for your robot in order to perform various actions and/or react to the environment. The coding on a Raspberry Pi can be performed using Python. The Possibilities are endless!
Game Development:
Create a video game using module Pygame. Basically, you use Python to write the logic of the game. PyGame applications can run on Android devices.
Web Scraping:
If you need to grab data from a website but the site does not have an API to expose data, use Python to scraping data.
Writing Scripts:
If you’re doing something manually and want to automate repetitive stuff, such as emails, it’s not difficult to automate once you know the basics of this language.
Browser Automation:
Perform some neat things such as opening a browser and posting a Facebook status, you can do it with Selenium with Python.
GUI Development:
Build a GUI application (desktop app) using Python modules Tkinter, PyQt to support it.
Rapid Prototyping:
Python has libraries for just about everything. Use it to quickly built a (lower-performance, often less powerful) prototype. Python is also great for validating ideas or products for established companies and start-ups alike.
Python can be used in so many different projects. If you’re a programmer looking for a new language, you want one that is growing in popularity. As a newcomer to programming, Python is the perfect choice for learning quickly and easily.