Main image of article Python: What's Behind Its Fast Growth?
Earlier this month, Stack Overflow crunched some data and concluded that Python is possibly the world’s fastest-growing programming language. In a new blog posting, the Website has begun to explore the reasons behind that expansion. One core rationale: burgeoning interest in data science. “The fastest-growing use of Python is for data science, machine learning and academic research,” read the posting. “This is particularly visible in the growth of the pandas package, which is the fastest-growing Python-related tag on the [Stack Overflow] site.” The language's relatively even growth across a broad swath of industries suggests that all kinds of companies are leaping into the data-analytics fray. “The growth of Python in the last year has been pretty evenly spread out across industries, at least in the U.S and U.K. In each industry the traffic to Python increased about 2-3 absolute percentage points,” the posting continued. “In many of these industries, Java remains the most-visited tag based on 2017 year-to-date traffic, but Python has been making progress.” In addition to its utility in data science and machine learning, Python has a longtime reputation as a versatile language for web development. When Stack Overflow crunched its data, it found spikes of activity around systems administration/DevOps and data engineering. Like other big languages, Python also offers an enormous amount of documentation. This is critical, as it allows newcomers to quickly learn what works, and how to overcome all sorts of challenges. With every new app or platform, its “stickiness” increases: few developers want to rewrite a working product in another language. That’s a key reason behind Python’s longtime dominance of various lists of the world’s most popular programming languages, alongside JavaScript and a handful of others. New to programming and interested in learning more? Check out these resources: 5 Reasons to Learn Python This article delves deep, covering Python's utility as a general-purpose language, its constant evolution, and its relative ease of use. Top 5 Python GUI Frameworks The Python wiki on GUI programming lists over 30 cross-platform frameworks in addition to Pyjamas, a tool for cross-browser Web development. This article focuses on which ones are worth your time. Web Development in Python and web2py The language offers some powerful tools for building Web assets. Its ample documentation can also prove a big help if you find yourself stuck. Using Python for High-Performance Frameworks Here’s a breakdown of the language’s asynchronous programming abilities, including multi-core and vectorized programming in various dialects and implementations.