Python

Within these castle walls be forged Mavens of Computer Science ...

— Merlin, The Coder

What is Python?

Python is a high-level, general purpose programming language. Here is some quick information about Python:

• Python is open source
• Python is free and on multiple platforms
• Python is easy to pick up (a great beginner programming language)
• There are thousands of online tutorials on Python
• Python has many third party applications
• Supports different types of programming such as object-oriented, structured and functional programming
• Python is updated often
• Python is an interpreted programming language

Some great websites to use when programming in Python is the official documentation, and W3schools if you are looking for coding references or tutorials.

History of Python

Guido van Rossum released Python on February 20, 1991. Contrary to common belief, Python is named after an old comedy show called Monty Python's Flying Circus, not after the type of snake. Python 2.0 was released in October of 2000, and Python 3.0 was released in December of 2008. In the time in which this was written, Python is currently in 3.11.0.

Principles of Python

The zen of python

1. Beautiful is better than ugly.
2. Explicit is better than implicit.
3. Simple is better than complex.
4. Complex is better than complicated.
5. Flat is better than nested.
6. Sparse is better than dense.
7. Readability counts.
8. Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
9. Although practicality beats purity.
10. Errors should never pass silently.
11. Unless explicitly silenced.
12. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
13. There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.
14. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
15. Now is better than never.
16. Although never is often better than right now.
17. If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
18. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
19. Namespaces are one honking great idea – let's do more of those!

You can see this by: import this

Pros of Python

• Python is very easy to learn and is a great learning tool
• You can use python to branch off to other languages
• It has many use cases

1. Web development (Flask)
2. Game development (pygame)
3. Bot development (discord.py)

Cons of Python

• Python is slower compared to other programming languages

References

Python.org

Python Documentation

Wikipedia

Code Academy

W3Schools

Pythoninstitute.org

Zen Of Python Wiki