Introduction & Setup
Python is an interpreted and general-purpose programming language which is also dynamically typed and strongly typed language. We will cover concepts of dynamically and statically typed language in the next section in great detail.
Python is first released in 1991 and developed by “Guido van Rossum”. It supports procedural programming as well as functional programming.
Why python?
- Easy to learn and quick to start.
- Great community to get support.
- Great for web development, backend, and Machine learning, etc.
- Has huge scientific libraries.
- Supports third-party libraries.
- Open source and community development.
Python version:
Currently, there are two major versions in python. python-2x and python-3x.
Recently Python-3x is more active in development whereas python 2x has seen no major changes to it.
Details of changes and which python to use can be found in python’s official wiki page here.
Python-2x will not be maintained beyond the year 2020. Similarly, a lot of popular libraries also will not support python-2x.
Like Unix, Python as a language has different python flavors. Below are examples of different python flavors.
- Jpython
- Pypy
- Anaconda python
- Ryby python
We will not go into details of each type of python flavors as it is beyond the scope of this discussion.
Setup:
Python supports most of the major platforms. In this section, we will demonstrate the installation of python in the Windows and Unix systems.
Details of python versions can be found here.
Windows Installation:
- To download python’s latest version, navigate to python’s official site. Click here.
- Download the latest release or look for a specific version.
- Run the python-3.x.x.exe file and follow the instruction.
- Upon completion of setup, verify installation in cmd prompt.
python --version
Unix Installation:
For Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install python3
For RedHat Linux
sudo yum install python
Upon successful completion, open the terminal, and run the following command.
python --version
