Why Is Python So Popular?

Before answering why is Python so popular?  What do you think popularity is? How does popularity make anything relevant? Why or How should it guide your decision? In this article, we will be covering all these questions along with statistics to help you choose. This article will help you understand the factors that make Python a very handy skill to have. 

There is no doubt that one of the reasons why is Python so popular as a programming language is that it’s a great way to learn how to code. The code’s readability like the English language along with its various features that allows you to write complex functions. It has various applications as well. But let’s take a deeper dive and understand ‘Popularity’ first.

What Defines ‘Popular’?

So which language is most popular? That, my fellow readers, is not as easy to answer as you might think. The key is to determine what defines popular. The Internet is way bigger than you imagine. People are transferring data, information and knowledge at an astronomical rate every day. What might seem popular to you, might just be popular in your social circle, that website or that geographical or demographical context.

The list shows several possible factors for measuring why is Python so popular? which includes:

The number of times the language name is mentioned in web searches, such as indicated by Google Trends

• The number of job advertisements that mention the language
• The number of books sold that teach or describe the language
• Estimates of the number of existing lines of code written in the language, which may underestimate languages not often found in public searches
• The number of projects in that language on SourceForge, Freecode, and GitHub
• The number of postings in forums and newsgroups about the language
• The number of courses sold by programming bootcamps
• The number of students enrolled in programming classes around the world
• The number of videos on each language on YouTube
• The number of postings on Reddit or Stack Exchange about a language

You get the idea. This can get even more complicated if you factor in popularity across nations. Are certain languages more popular in India? In the United States? In Russia?

The bottom line is that popularity is not a single vector answer. We went across several websites, blogs and industry leaders pages and compiled our findings.

How Popular Is Python?

Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow is a huge open community for anyone that codes. They do various kinds of stuff for the businesses by helping developers write the script of the future. They share a blog and chart showing how technologies have trended over time based on the use of their tags since 2008. Python has shown tremendous 27% year-over-year growth rate.

They have future projections on their blogs as well, which also describes how python will either stay in the lead or worse case- be overtaken by the fall., but it’s clearly on track to become the most popular.

TIOBE

TIOBE checks more than 1056 million lines of software codes for its customers worldwide, real-time, each day. The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third-party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings.

Python has been on the rise for a long time now securing its place at No. 3 compared to that of no. 7 in 2014. Python also achieved their Programming Language Hall of Fame for Language of the year 2018.

PYPL Index

PYPL Popularity of Programming Language Index is created by analyzing how often language tutorials are searched on Google: the more a language tutorial is searched, the more popular the language is assumed to be. It is a leading indicator. The raw data comes from Google Trends.

If you believe in collective wisdom, the PYPL Popularity of Programming Language index can help you decide which language to study, or which one to use in a new software project.

PYPLI language Index ranks Python at no. 1 which a year-on-year trend of +4.2 which is highest compared to every other language on the list.

IEEE Spectrum

IEEE Spectrum is the flagship magazine and website of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences. Our charter is to keep over 400,000 members informed about major trends and developments in technology, engineering, and science. Our blogs, podcasts, news and features stories, videos and interactive infographics engage our visitors with clear explanations about emerging concepts and developments with details they can’t get elsewhere.

IEEE  Spectrum’s app ranks the popularity of dozens of programming languages. Rankings are created by weighting and combining 11 metrics from 8 sources—CareerBuilder, Google, GitHub, Hacker News, the IEEE, Reddit, Stack Overflow, and Twitter. Read more about their method and sources here. They also rank Python to be the number 1 language in their ranking followed by Java, C, C++ and R.

Coding Dojo

Coding Dojo is the first school in the world to teach three full stacks of software development in 14 weeks: an ability only acquirable through years of refinement and only enabled by a staff of seasoned web developers through decades of programming experience. As per their Coding Dojo’s study, out of the top 25 unicorn Companies, 20 companies were using Python as their programming language followed by Java (19 companies). Based on another study by the same company, Python jobs are skyrocketing with an increase of about 24% with 61,000 thousand job postings compared to last year’s 46,000.

TechRepublic

TechRepublic is an online trade publication and social community for IT professionals, with advice on best practices and tools for the day-to-day needs of IT decision-makers. It highlights a report that surveyed 700 software engineers on the Hired platform to determine their working preferences, including how developers feel about working in particular coding languages, and why.

Here are the five most loved programming languages, and the percentage of developers who ranked it as one of their favourites, according to the report:

1. Python (51%)
2. JavaScript (49%)
3. Java (37%)
4. HTML (34%)
5. C++ (23%)

Python and JavaScript lead in terms of most loved languages. But Java which is on no.3 on the most loved list is also no 2. On the most hated list.

Here are the three most hated programming languages:

1. PHP (19%)
2. Java (12%)
3. Objective-C (11%)

How does popularity make anything relevant?

It does not relate to relevance. Your interest, purpose and choice make anything relevant. Python no doubt is among the most popular language. Golang, a computer language created by Google is among the fastest-growing language today. So, is Golang relevant? I don’t think so, not at this moment. C# by Microsoft, Swift by Apple are also highly popular languages. If you are looking for a good job in Technical field, you should train yourself in the technologies that have a lot of demand in the industry. In order to measure this demand, popularity ratings are one of the most reliable metrics.

Why or How should it guide your decision?

Python has come a long way since its inception in 1991. Python 2.0, released in 2000, introduced features like list comprehensions and a garbage collection system capable of collecting reference cycles. Python 3.0, released in 2008, was a major revision of the language. Corporate sponsorship in Python and the so-called technologies for the future: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of things are all powered by Python. You should decide based on the purpose.

If you are a beginner, a general-purpose language of computer programming provides for a very good base. A highly versatile, feature-rich language provides you with a lot of options to try out new applications. It is wise to start with a simple and very easy to learn programming language. A statement of Python is very simple like: Print “Hello World”.

Understanding the basics of any language is just a matter of a few days. When you do deep into any specific application, then it is very vast. Every specialization comes with a set of libraries, data structures, algorithms etc..  which requires some time to be an expert. Any language with a strong developing community making significant contributions for its development ensures its relevancy for the future as well as provides solutions for a lot of day to day problem statements.

What does it all mean? Why is Python so popular?

Python is trending. There is a lot of demand for python courses, books, videos by the students. A lot of queries, databases of codes for all different applications, number of postings in forums and newsgroups about the language by professionals. The market and community are very active on Google, Twitter, Github, Stackoverflow, Reddit, Tech news sites, blogs, forums etc.. , Job Sites, Publication sites on the Internet.

Technology Companies are investing a lot of money to develop their products and services on Python. A large majority of web applications and platforms rely on Python, including Google’s search engine, YouTube, and the web-oriented transaction system of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). In 2016, the Instagram engineering team boasted that they were running the world’s largest deployment of the Django web framework, which is written entirely in Python. This music streaming giant Spotify is a huge proponent of Python, using the language primarily for data analysis and back end services. Same goes for other Technology giants like Quora, Netflix, Dropbox, Reddit.

1. Best Language to Learn for Beginners

The simple design philosophy, versatility, corporate sponsorship, huge development community and academic adoption fueled the growth of Python. Python is one of the easiest programming languages to learn, since it reads and writes quite a bit like plain English.

2. The versatility of Python – Lots of Applications

Python is heavily used in the Internet of things. Devices like the Raspberry Pi are tiny and connect to a multitude of sensors, displays, lights, robots and more, and allow you to write code to communicate between these parts, as well as send and receive data over Bluetooth, the internet and other communication methods. Python is instrumental in data science and AI.   Python comes with a lot of built-in libraries that provide a lot of the functionality a data scientist might need,  such as NumPy, Pandas, matplotlib, and SciPy for math, data manipulation, data visualization and more.

3. Python is highly productive.

The software development models such as Agile model for development and design thinking processes for project development which goes very well with the productivity of coding with python (especially because of features like debugging and error handling) in recent years lead to a lot of successful products like Instagram, Spotify etc.. Python is ideal for rapid application development and scripting.

Other blogs you may like:

1. Best Guide To Start With Python Programming
2. Top 15 Reasons Why You Should Learn Python
3. Latest CBSE Class 12 Computer Science Python Syllabus

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