Python for Absolute Beginners Transcripts
Chapter: Welcome to the course
Lecture: Why learn Python (over other languages)?
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Does it seem like Python is everywhere? Here's a cover story from TechRepublic. Python is eating the world how one developer side project
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became the hottest programming language on the planet. That guy you see in the background there
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his name is Guido van Rossum, and he created Python in 1990. And it grew and grew and became a pretty respectable language
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it was doing important work until around 2012 where something happened and it just took off. And really what the thing I think happened is
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Python started to be used much more broadly outside of the traditional web developer programming world. Data scientists started moving there
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and all the types of folks I mentioned before with the superpower stuff, they saw Python having the right mix of what they need to get their work done
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and there are just more and more libraries hundreds of thousands of them actually created to solve all these problems. So Python is just blowing up
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and becoming an extremely popular programming language. How much, well let's go over this place called Stack Overflow. If you're not a developer yet
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you might not be aware of what Stack Overflow is. If you've done any programming at all, though you've been there. Stack Overflow is a Q&A site
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for asking questions about very specific issues and questions and challenges you have with programming languages programming libraries, and so on.
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Hundreds of thousands if not millions of questions many millions of visitors it's absolutely the first place you're going to find
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on the internet if you search for a detail about some programming language. Over here, they have this cool thing called Stack Overflow trends.
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And it shows the popularity or number of questions of the given programming language for that month. You can go and you see this goes from 2009
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to almost 2020, a little over 10 years of data. And I put into this graph all the interesting programming languages
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C#, Python, JavaScript, Java, etc, etc. Right, these are the mainstream programming languages that you might consider learning if you're like
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Hey, I want to get into programming but there's all these options, where should I start?" Well, this graph gives you a hint
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and a good place to start, doesn't it? You don't have to be a mathematician to see that there might be one trend here
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and it's a little different than the others. But let me highlight that for you. If you look at Python, the growth of it is just exploding
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and it's becoming the most popular programming language in the world also the most popular way to learn programming at universities in the first place
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and this is really important because along with this curve here other things follow. This means that there are tones of jobs in Python.
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It also means there are many, many libraries that you can use to solve your problems. For example, there are over 500 different libraries
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just to do genetics. You don't have to start from scratch you can just say, I'd like to do this thing with genetics and there's probably
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some library out there you can go grab. You find one of these languages that's down near the bottom it's very unlikely there are many, many
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different little libraries you're going to have to solve those problems from scratch yourself. Though having a popular language
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is really important for lots of things but mostly because the tools and the libraries that you want to use, they're going to be great and plentiful.
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Finally, if you want to read a little bit about it a data scientist over at Stack Overflow wrote a cool article called The Incredible Growth of Python.
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And this was already evident back in 2017 you follow that graph back a little bit and you see, the big statement was
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well, it's starting to be more popular than these other languages, and we're projecting out that it's going to be pretty amazing.
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And yet, their predictions are right this just keeps on going but if you want to dig into a little bit more this is quite an interesting article
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you can check out over there.