The “Corona period” has let many people introspect themselves, ponder a little more upon their fields of interest and polish them eventually. Undoubtedly, Python has become the “Talk Of The Town” in the technological field during this span for a variety of reasons.
The Story Behind the Name…
When Guido Van Rossum and his team created the python language, they wanted to come up with a short, quirky, and a little peculiar name. Since he was reading the published scripts from “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” from the 1970s at that time, he came up with the name “Python”.
Necessity is the mother of invention….
Rossum worked with the Certified Welding Inspector (CWI) group initially on an interpreted language in ABC group where he mastered language design. All this knowledge helped him to implement it in python like the indentation of the statements. One of the major problems with this interpreted language was its lack of extensibility.
The system administration was done either by C programs or Bourne Shell scripts at the Amoeba distributed operating system which was a part of CWI. Van Rossum felt a need for a level up in the process because Amoeba had its system call interface which was not easy to access. He realized a dire need for a language that was scripting as the interpreted language and had easy access to the Amoeba interface. With ample time in his hands during the Christmas holidays, he thought to give it a go which went on to celebrate major success.
Python’s simplicity, easiness, layman language use, and portability made it a part of the academic curriculum of the school students too. The ability to extend in C or C++ and being able to run on Unix variants, Mac, PC’s under MS-DOS, Windows, Windows NT make it even more desirable. It is accompanied by a large Standard library that has String processing, Internet protocols, OS interfaces, etc. The major reason behind having a large collection of libraries is that it is backed by Facebook, AWS, and Google.
The Long Library List…
- NumPy:
Created in 2005 by Travis Oliphant, NumPy is an open-source project retained on Github with a varied community. NumPy stands for Numerical Python. Python supports lists which are equivalent to arrays but are quite slow to process. Consequently, NumPy came into action as it provides an array object which is 50 times faster than lists because they are stored at one continuous place and hence are more systematic and efficient. It supports mathematical functions, linear algebra, Fourier transforms, and much more and goes well with hardware, GPU, and infrequent array libraries.
Below is a simple snippet illustrating the NumPy library.
- Pandas:
The term Pandas is derived from “Panel Data”, which is used for data sets that involve observations on a particular data multiple times. This open-source project is efficient and easy to use. Built by Wes McKinney, Pandas was introduced to facilitate the data set work. The library’s application is varied into fields like finance, economics, statistics, analytics. One of the most important libraries used in data science fields, it serves as the backbone to many of the projects. The code module below illustrates a simple example:
- Matplotlib:
Developed by John D. Hunter, a neurobiologist, Matplotlib is a library used for data visualization. The open-source library is helpful in 2D plotting of the data by using interesting synergetic figures that can zoom, update, etc. with full ability to customize the plots. It has an object-oriented API and is written mostly in python while some of its segments are written in C and Javascript too.
Basic functioning of the library is shown below:
- Pillow:
Pillow, the Python Imaging Library is one of the most essential libraries used for image modifications like a blur, crop, resizing, rotate, adding and removing watermarks, etc., and provides fast access to data stored in basic image formats. The free and open-source software supports numerous file formats such as BMP, PNG, JPEG, TIFF. Pillow is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
The image manipulations are given below:
- Flask
This in-demand WSGI framework is used for making web applications. Having a short and easily extendable core, flask supports many attractive features like URL routing, template engine, etc. It is based on the Jinja template engine and Werkzeug WSGI toolkit which are Pocco projects developed by a team of Python enthusiasts, under the leadership of Armin Ronacher, the developer of Flask.
- Turtle:
This pre-installed python library is one of the most interesting libraries used for creating images and different intricate shapes using the pen provided on the canvas which is called a turtle. Its origin goes back to the original LOGO programming language developed by Wally Feurzig and Seymour Papert in 1966. The fun library is a great way to introduce python to the upcoming generations. An illustration is shown below:
There are many more libraries that can be explored and have a huge importance in significant python projects. Keep learning and practicing daily and one day we all can be as successful and as learned as the “Chintu” from “ White Hat Jr”. Happy coding!
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