Python

Python is actually a few years older than Java, but in the last couple of years it has been tremendously successful and it is considered „modern“ today.

Python comes in two major versions Python 2 and Python 3. It took more than a decade for Python 3 to surpass Python 2, but it looks like that has finally happend a few years ago. The Python community was fortunately strong enough to support both versions at a high level for such a long time. But, please, use Python 3, if you can, preferrably a recent version.

Actually I recommend learning Python, because it is good to know it in this time. I would not call it a favorite language. To my impression Ruby has similar capabilities, but is a much more beautiful language. Perl is still a bit easier for „small tasks“, especially one liners using regular expressions. Raku tried to be a better replacement for Perl and has some great concepts, but didn’t really pick up momentum. Clojure is a phantastic language, but it forces two challenges on the ones who try to learn it. You need to embrace the Lisp-Syntax and the functional paradigm at once.

Then again there are statically typed languages, like Rust, Java, Kotlin, Scala, C#, F# or Swift, that tend to eliminate some errors at compile time and and that tend run faster, especially in conjunction with full native compilation like using llvm or Graal VM.

I do not like the syntax with „significant whitespace“, but since I use indention to emphasize structure anyway, I would not call that a show stopper.

So what is cool about Python?

I think that it is relatively easy to learn for someone who already knows several programming languages. It is a multi paradigm language which support object orientented programming, procedural programming and functional programming and it follows pretty much common sense of what can be find in other programming languages.

The most important advantage comes from the fact that Python is heavily used in certain areas and that there are a lot of libraries available, especially in these areas. It has actually bein among the most popular languages on Tiobe Index and it is actually Number 1 today (2025-04-10) and has been „number 1“ or at least „almost number 1“ since 2021.

I see the following areas:

• Scripting language for system engineering and related tasks (competing and replacing Perl and Ruby and to a minor extend Bash)
• Artificial Intelligence
• Data Science
• Scientific Computing
• Usage as embedded language
• Google is known to heavily rely on Python (among other languages)
• Many other organizations list Python among the „recommended programming languages“, but do not recommend using Perl or Ruby
• and of course a lot of programming as a general purpose language

In the end of the day the results that can be achieved count and a lot of cool software has been done in Python.
I will use Python in the future and explore where it can be useful.