Python language is an open-source programming language. It was created in 1989 by Guido van Rossum and its first public version was published in 1991. Its version 2.0 was released in 2000 and its version 3.0 in 2008. We are currently at version 3.10 of the language. It is reputed to be the easiest programming language to learn. The name Python comes from the television series Monty Python's Flying Circus which Guido is a fan of.
Key Features of Python
Python is a language with strong dynamic typing. This means that the typing of values is done on the fly by the interpreter during code execution and not upstream (for example during compilation). Strong means that implicit type conversions are impossible. Python is an interpreted language so it is not parsed and translated into machine language once and for all but at each execution of the program and that it is necessary to use an interpreter at each execution.
Python is a language with automatic memory management by garbage collector,, therefore the interpreter will automatically allocate and free the memory used by the program. Python is a multi-paradigm language. It can be used in object-oriented programming (OOP), functional programming, imperative programming, etc. For info, Python developer jobs are growing day by day.
Finally, Python is a high-level language with a simple syntax. This means that the language seeks to be close to natural language for ease of use, unlike a low-level language which seeks to be as close as possible to the technical characteristics of the computer (registers, processors, memory, etc.).
Python version 3
Python 3 was released in 2008, yet Python 2 end of life did not come until 2020. Version 3 introduced significant changes to the language to fix problems inherent in earlier versions. The main change is the use of Unicode instead of ASCII for all character strings. It should be remembered that Python was released before the first version of Unicode, which explains why it had not integrated the standard into the core of the language. The adoption of version 3 was very long by the community because it required refactoring the existing code and waiting for all the libraries used by its project to have carried out this refactoring. This is because code written in Python 2 is not compatible with Python 3 without making some changes. For this reason, companies as large as Dropbox (migration in 2018) or Instagram (migration in 2017) waited a long time before deciding to migrate and took a long time to do so (for example 10 months for Instagram or 3 years for Dropbox). There shouldn't be a version 4 of Python. The breaking changes having taken place and the migration experience to version 3 having been very complicated.
Most used language for data science
Python is by far the most widely used language for data science. For example, for operations on matrices and multidimensional arrays, one of the most used libraries is Numpy. Another example, Pandas is the most widely used library for data manipulation and analysis. For machine learning, very famous Python libraries are Keras, SciKit-Learn, PyTorch or TensorFlow. For data visualization, Python also has a large number of extremely well-known libraries such as: Matplotlib, Seaborn or Pandas (which also allows data visualization).
After all, Python is the language with the strongest growth and for example the most questions on Stackoverflow since mid-2018. Same thing on search engines, according to the TIOBE index which refers, Python is the most popular language in the world.