Top 14 Application of Python | What is Python used for?

In this article, we will be discussing the overview of Python, what is python used for, and the application of Python.

What is Python? Python is an object-oriented, interpreted high-level programming language with dynamic semantics. Python’s easy-to-learn syntax which is beginner-friendly and focuses on readability, a vast collection of libraries, and modules emphasizes code reuse. Python is an open-source language that makes it freely usable.

Python was created in the late 1980s by Guido Ran Rossum capable of exception handling and interfacing with the Amoeba operating system. On 16th October 2000, Python 2.0 was released with many major new features were introduced, including cycle-detecting garbage collector and support for Unicode.

Python 3.0 was released on 3 December 2008. It was the major revision of the language that is not completely backward compatible.

What is Python used for? Python is an object-oriented, general-purpose programming language, which enables us to use it in many types of applications. Python has covered almost all the domains, python is used for machine learning, artificial intelligence, web development, Data Science, web scraping, video games, and other domains as well.

Why Python is so Popular?

According to TIOBE index Python is amongst the top3 programming languages competing with JAVA and C. There are many such features that makes python so popular such as:-

Easy Syntax

Python is a very easy-to-learn programming language. We can easily read, write, and understand Python code. Its syntax is just like English.
Due to its simplicity, a beginner can start his/her programming journey with python easily.

Large Collections of Libraries

Python comes with huge standard library support.
When we install python by default these libraries are present in your system.
Python also provides a package installer called pip which allows us to download other useful python packages.

Open Source and Huge Community

Python is an open-source language and freely available and anyone can use python code. And there is a Python community that helps to develop and support the ecosystem, adding their contributions and libraries.

Application of Python

Web Development

Python can be used to develop web applications at a rapid rate, this is possible because of python’s powerful web development frameworks. In these frameworks, the backend logic is done with python and provides a huge number of libraries.

Python provides frameworks like Django and Pyramid for heavy applications, Micro frameworks such as Flask and Bottle, and advanced content management frameworks like Plone and Django CMS.

Python standard libraries support internet protocols like HTTP, XML, SMTP, JSON, FTP, IMAP, etc.

Game Development

Python is used for the development of interactive games. Game developers use python for its rapid prototyping features. There are several libraries in python that support game development, in which the PyGame library is considered one of the best. Python also provides libraries like Pyglet and PyOpenGL.

Games like Civilization IV, Battlefield 2, Disney’s Toontown Online, Freedom Force, Vega Strike, etc are all created with the help of Python.

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are the most trendings domains. For a Machine Learning project, we need a language that is secure, stable, scalable, and no surprise that python handles all these characteristics.

The language support of tools and libraries that are perfect for building ML/AI applications

TensorFlow, Keras, and Scikit-learn for ML
SciPy for advanced computing
Pandas for data analysis
Numpy for scientific calculations

Desktop GUIs

We develop Graphical User Interface(GUI) applications with python by using special libraries provided with it.

Python’s Tkinter library is very popular among developers and used often.
Python also provides GUI Frameworks like PyQt, PyGtk, Kivy, Tkinter, WxPython, PyGUI, and PySide which provide opportunities to developers to create interactive applications.
It has also Platform-specific toolkits like GTK+ and Microsoft Foundation Classes through the win32 extensions.

Data Science and Data Visualization

The next important application of python is Data Science and Data Visualization. In today’s world, data play a very important role in any organization. An organization used its past data and extract information which can be useful to improve their strategy and grow business.

Python is the best language for Data Science and Data Visualization because of the powerful libraries like Pandas and Numpy.

The libraries like Matplotlib and Seaborn help us to present the data in a graphical form such as graphs, pie charts, etc. If you master these mentioned libraries you can call yourself a Data Scientist.

Web scraping

Web scraping is the mechanism for extracting unstructured data from websites and stored in a structured form. Web Scraping can be useful in weather applications, job listing websites, price comparison, etc.

Web scraping can be done with Python by using its support libraries. Python provides libraries for web scraping such as Beautiful Soup, LXML, Urllib, Scrapy, Selenium, etc for performing Web Scraping effectively.

Business Applications

E-commerce and ERP types of applications called Business Applications. Business applications have to be readable, scalable, and extensible in nature, it should fit the requirement of the organization.

Python provides all these that require to build a business application. Python provides platforms such as Tryton and Odoo for the development of business applications.

Tryton – Tryton is a three-tier general-purpose application platform.
Odoo – Odoo is an all-in-one management software that offers a complete suite of enterprise management applications.

Scientific and Numeric Computing

Python is used for developing Scientific and Numeric applications. As it has Scientific and Mathematical libraries that can be useful to solve complex mathematical calculations easily.

Libraries for Scientific and Numeric Computing in Python are:

SciPy – It is useful for scientific, mathematical, and scientific problems.
Pandas – It is used for data analysis and data modeling.
Numpy – It is used for multidimensional matrix, linear algebra, and Fourier transform.
IPython – It is used for easy editing and recording of a work session, and supports visualizations and parallel computing.

Software Development

Python is a very popular open-source software development language that provides enhanced process control capabilities. Python is used by software developers for build control management, testing, and many other ways.

Python provides software tools such as:

SCons – It is used for build control
Buildbot and Apache Gump – Used for automated compilation and testing
Roundup or Trac – For Project management and bug tracking

Image Processing

Another application of python is Image processing. Image Processing is the process of enhancing an image or extracting information from an image. Python provides various libraries that can be used to word with the images or manipulate the images.

Python libraries for image processing are:

Scikit-image – It is a collection of algorithms for image processing.
Open cv – Open cv is a huge open-source library for computer vision, machine learning, and image processing.
Pillow – Pillow is a python library that adds the support for opening, saving, and manipulating images

Natural Langauge Processing

The other important application of python is Natural Langauge Processing(NLP). Natural language processing (NLP) is a collective term referring to the automatic computational processing of human languages.

Top Natural Langauge Processing Libraries provided by python are:

Natural Langauge ToolKit (NLTK) – NLTK is a leading platform for building Python programs to work with human language data.

TextBlob – For processing textual data.
Polyglot – Polyglot is a natural language pipeline that supports massive multilingual applications. The features include tokenization, language detection, named entity recognition, part of speech tagging, sentiment analysis, word embeddings, etc.
Vocabulary – Vocabulary is a Python library for natural language processing which is basically a dictionary in the form of a Python module

Embedded Applications

Python is written in C, which means it can also be for developed embedded applications. The most popular embedded application of python is Rasberry Pi which uses python for its computing.

Zerynth and MicroPython are the python-based platforms used to develop embedded applications.

Audio Video applications

The application which can multi-task and output media can also be developed using Python. Python also supports multi-media libraries. Audio Video applications such as Tim Player, CPlay are build using python and its libraries.

Some of the multimedia python libraries are:

Gstreamer – Gstreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one format, processes them, and exports them in another.
Pyglet – Pyglet is a cross-platform windowing and multimedia library for Python, intended for developing games and other visually rich applications.
QT Phonon – It is a cross-platform multimedia framework that enables the use of audio and video content in Qt applications.

CAD Applications

Computer-Aided Designing is used to design engineering-related architecture. It is one of the complex applications.

Python simplifies this by providing libraries and packages for CAD applications.

Fandango – Python library for developing functional and multithreaded control applications and scripts.
PythonCAD – PythonCAD project aims to produce a scriptable, open-source, easy to use CAD package for Linux.

FAQ’s

Is Python used professionally?

Python has great impact and importance while professional software development. The projects which need data analytics, machine learning, and data processing run python scripts at the backend.

What are 3 main application of Python?