Why should we learn Python?

We are living in an increasingly digitized society. Information technology penetrates to every single corner of this planet, ranging from day-to-day shopping to the monetary system. Every few months, there is a report to estimate how many jobs today will be replaced by artificial intelligence. In this context, we should better learn some programming languages to communicate with computers before they wake up with self-consciousness and conquer the whole world!

However, there are as many programming languages as our human languages. Which one should the beginner start with? I recommend Python because of its easy development environment, simple syntax, huge community to solve your difficulties and ability to create programs that can help your daily life.

First of all, you don’t need to install many different software or launch the horrible black window, aka command prompt to develop and run the Python program. All you need is included in Anaconda containing the Python engine and Jupyter Notebook, a user friendly development tool. Go ahead to download it from https://www.anaconda.com/download/ . If you still think it is quite troublesome, just try its online version first ( http://jupyter.org/try ).

Installing software is just a one-off task so you only feel pain in a short time even the process is complicated. However, beginners can easily be discouraged if the syntax is not simple. Whenever you write the code, you feel the pain. Luckily, Python is designed to have a simple syntax to save programmers some time. The following is the comparison of Java and Python program of displaying ‘Hello World’ in the output window. It only takes 1 line for Python instead of 3 lines for Java. I am not saying Java is a bad language because of its lengthier code. Different languages possess with different pros and cons. More lines of code create a higher barrier for beginners to kick-start the learning.

Since most people learn coding without a teacher sitting aside, Google becomes the best place to find answers when you encounter difficulties. Python was released in 1991 so it has already accumulated large amount of developers forming a huge community which makes beginners easier to find suitable solutions and learning materials by searching in Google. If you learn some niche languages, you will easily end up taking many hours without fixing any bug.

Lastly, perhaps the most important reason, you can use the Python program in your daily life right after building it. It is awesome to create a mobile app but you may not find anything useful from that app unless you are actually launching a real startup. However, many Python programs can actually help us to automate some tedious and repetitive tasks. This can greatly increase your motivation to learn Python as you can use what you built. For example, you want to read news articles from your favourite media websites during a long flight but you don’t want to pay so much for the in-flight wifi. Python can help you to automatically download all news articles from most of the media websites. By web scrapping, Python can download whatever you want from the internet.

Sounds fun? Let’s start coding. ‘Automate the Boring Stuff with Python’ is my most favourite e-book to learn Python. Most importantly, it is free! ( https://automatetheboringstuff.com/ ) Drop me questions if you want to know more on how to learn Python.