Portal:Python (programming language)
Introduction
Python is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language. Created by Guido van Rossum and first released in 1991, Python has a design philosophy that emphasizes code readability, notably using significant whitespace. It provides constructs that enable clear programming on both small and large scales. Van Rossum led the language community until stepping down as leader in July 2018.
Python features a dynamic type system and automatic memory management. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including object-oriented, imperative, functional and procedural, and has a large and comprehensive standard library.
Selected general articles
- The Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) is a simple calling convention for web servers to forward requests to web applications or frameworks written in the Python programming language. The current version of WSGI, version 1.0.1, is specified in Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) 3333.
WSGI was originally specified as PEP-333 in 2003. PEP-3333, published in 2010, updates the specification for Python 3. Read more... - Cython is a programming language that aims to be a superset of the Python programming language, designed to give C-like performance with code that is written mostly in Python with optional additional C-inspired syntax.
Cython is a compiled language that is typically used to generate CPython extension modules. Annotated python-like code is compiled to C or C++ then automatically wrapped in interface code, producing extension modules that can be loaded and used by regular Python code using the import statement, but with significantly less computational-overhead at run-time. Cython also facilitates wrapping independent C or C++ code into python-importable modules.
Cython is written in Python and C and works on Windows, macOS, and Linux, producing source files compatible with CPython 2.6, 2.7, and 3.3 through 3.7. Read more...
CPython is the reference implementation of the Python programming language. Written in C and Python, CPython is the default and most widely-used implementation of the language.
CPython can be defined as both an interpreter and a compiler as it compiles Python code into bytecode before interpreting it. It has a foreign function interface with several languages including C, in which one must explicitly write bindings in a language other than Python. Read more...- Implementations of Python include:
- CPython – The reference implementation, written in C89. Some notable distributions include:
- PSF Python – Reference distribution that includes only selected standard libraries
- ActivePython – Distribution with more than 300 included packages that is optimized to ensure compatibility and performance
- Intel Distribution for Python – High performance distribution with conda and pip package managers
- Stackless Python – CPython with coroutines
- MicroPython – Python 3 implementation for microcontroller platforms
- Brython – Python 3 implementation for client-side web programming
- CLPython – Implementation, written in Common Lisp
- Cython – programming language to simplify writing C and C++ extension modules for the CPython Python runtime.
- IronPython – Python for CLI platforms (including .NET and Mono)
- Jython – Python for Java platforms
- Pyjs – a framework (based on GWT concept) for developing client-side Python-based web applications, including a stand-alone Python-to-JavaScript compiler, an Ajax framework and widget toolkit
- PyPy – Python (originally) coded in Python, used in conjunction RPython, a restricted subset of Python that is amenable to static analysis and therefore a JIT.
- PyPy.js – PyPy-based Python JIT targeting asm.js
- Numba – NumPy aware LLVM-based JIT compiler
- Shed Skin – Source-to-source compiler from Python to C++
- Skulpt – JavaScript implementation of Python 2 for client-side web programming
- Transcrypt – Python 3 to JavaScript compiler allowing source level debugging through sourcemaps
- Nuitka – is a source to source compiler which compiles Python code to C/C++ executables, or C/C++ source code.
Historic Python implementations include:- Parrot – Virtual machine being developed mainly as the runtime for Perl 6, but with the intent to also support dynamic languages like Python, Ruby, Tcl, etc.
- Pyrex – Python-like Python module development project that has mostly been eclipsed by Cython
- Python for S60 – CPython port to the S60 platform
- Pyston – an open source Python implementation using JIT techniques. Currently targeting Python 2 support.
- Psyco – specialized JIT compiler project that has mostly been eclipsed by PyPy
- Unladen Swallow – performance orientated implementation based on CPython which natively executed its bytecode via an LLVM-based JIT compiler
- CPython – The reference implementation, written in C89. Some notable distributions include:
PyPy is an alternative implementation of the Python programming language to CPython, which is the standard implementation of Python. PyPy often runs faster than CPython, because PyPy is a just-in-time compiler, while CPython is an interpreter. Most Python code runs well on PyPy, except for code that depends on CPython extensions, which either does not work or incurs some overhead when run in PyPy. Functionally, PyPy is designed around the technique known as meta-tracing, which transforms an interpreter into a tracing just-in-time compiler. Since interpreters are usually easier to write than compilers, but run slower, this technique can make it easier to produce efficient implementations of programming languages. PyPy's meta-tracing toolchain is called RPython. Read more...- The Python programming language is actively used by many people, both in industry and academia for a wide variety of purposes. Read more...
- Shed Skin is a Python to C++ programming language compiler. It is experimental, and can translate pure, but implicitly statically typed Python programs into optimized C++. It can generate stand-alone programs or extension modules that can be imported and used in larger Python programs.
Shed Skin is an open source project with contributions from many people, however the main author is Mark Dufour. Work has been going into Shed Skin since 2005. Read more... - The Python for S60 also called PyS60 (Unix name), was Nokia’s port of the general Python programming language to its S60 software platform, originally based on Python 2.2.2 from 2002.
The latest final version, PyS60-2.0.0, released on 11 February 2010 updated the python core to version 2.5.4. Read more... - CLPython is an implementation of the Python programming language written in Common Lisp.
This project allow to call Lisp functions from Python and Python functions from Lisp. Licensed under LLGPL.
CLPython was started in 2006, but at 2013 it was not actively developed, and mailing list was closed. Read more... - Numba is an open-source NumPy-aware optimizing compiler for Python sponsored by Anaconda, Inc and a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. It uses the LLVM compiler infrastructure to compile Python to CPU and GPU machine code. Read more...
PyCharm is an integrated development environment (IDE) used in computer programming, specifically for the Python language. It is developed by the Czech company JetBrains. It provides code analysis, a graphical debugger, an integrated unit tester, integration with version control systems (VCSes), and supports web development with Django.
PyCharm is cross-platform, with Windows, macOS and Linux versions. The Community Edition is released under the Apache License, and there is also Professional Edition with extra features, released under a proprietary license. Read more...
Selected biographies
- Glyph Lefkowitz is an American open-source software programmer and creator of the Twisted network programming framework for Python. His work on asynchronous programming techniques influenced the core Python language, as well as the JavaScript Promises ecosystem, through Dojo and Mochikit.
He is a frequent speaker at developer conferences and was elected a fellow of the Python Software Foundation in 2009.
Between 2009 and 2013, he was one of the primary contributors of Apple's Calendar and Contacts Server (CCS) software.
In 2017, the PSF awarded Lefkowitz their Community Service Award for his influence on the direction of the Python language and community, including his role in pioneering asynchronous programming models. - David Beazley is an American software engineer. He has made significant contributions to the Python developer community, which includes writing the definitive Python reference text Python Essential Reference, the SWIG software tool for creating language agnostic C and C++ extensions, and the PLY parsing tool. He has served on the program committees for PyCon and the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, and was elected a fellow of the Python Software Foundation in 2002.
- Guido van Rossum (Dutch: [ˈɣido vɑn ˈrɔsʏm, -səm]; born 31 January 1956) is a Dutch programmer best known as the author of the Python programming language, for which he was the "Benevolent dictator for life" (BDFL) until he stepped down from the position in July 2018.
- Armin Ronacher (born May 10, 1989) is an Austrian open source software programmer and the creator of the Flask web framework for Python.
He is a frequent speaker at developer conferences and has a popular blog about software development and open source. - Greg Stein (born March 16, 1967 in Portland, Oregon), living in Austin, Texas, United States, is a programmer, speaker, sometime standards architect, and open-source software advocate, appearing frequently at conferences and in interviews on the topic of open-source software development and use.
He was a director of the Apache Software Foundation, and served as chairman from 21 August 2002 to 20 June 2007. He is also a member of the Python Software Foundation, was a director there from 2001 to 2002, and a maintainer of the Python programming language and libraries (active from 1999 to 2002).
Stein has been especially active in version control systems development. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he helped develop the WebDAV HTTP versioning specification, and is the main author of mod_dav, the first open-source implementation of WebDAV. He was one of the founding developers of the Subversion project, and is primarily responsible for Subversion's WebDav networking layer.
Stein most recently worked as an engineering manager at Google, where he helped launch Google's open-source hosting platform. Stein publicly announced his departure from Google via his blog on July 29, 2008. Prior to Google, he worked for Oracle Corporation, eShop, Microsoft, CollabNet, and as an independent developer.
Stein was a major contributor to the Lima Mudlib, a MUD server software framework. His MUD community pseudonym was "Deathblade". - Travis Oliphant is an American data scientist and businessman. He is founder of technology startup Anaconda (previously Continuum Analytics). In addition, he is the primary creator of NumPy and founding contributor to the SciPy packages in the Python programming languages.
- Fernando Pérez is a physicist, software developer, and free software advocate. He is best known as the creator of the IPython programming environment, for which he received the 2012 Free Software Award from the Free Software Foundation. He is a fellow of the Python Software Foundation, and a founding member of the NumFOCUS organization.
- Alex Martelli (born October 5, 1955) is an Italian computer engineer and Fellow of the Python Software Foundation. Since early 2005, he works for Google, Inc. in Mountain View, California, for the first few years as "Über Tech Lead," then as "Senior Staff Engineer," currently in charge of "long tail" community support for Google Cloud Platform.
He holds a Laurea in Electrical Engineering from Bologna University (1980); he is the author of Python in a Nutshell (recently out in a third edition, which Martelli wrote with two co-authors), co-editor of the Python Cookbook's first two editions, and has written other (mostly Python-related) materials. Martelli won the 2002 Activators' Choice Award, and the 2006 Frank Willison award for outstanding contributions to the Python community.
Before joining Google, Martelli spent a year designing chips with Texas Instruments; eight years with IBM Research, gradually shifting from hardware to software, and winning three Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards; 12 as Senior Software Consultant at think3, Inc., developing libraries, network protocols, GUI engines, event frameworks, and web access frontends; and three more as a freelance consultant, working mostly for Open End AB, a Python-centered software house (formerly known as Strakt AB) located in Gothenburg, Sweden.
He has taught courses on programming, development methods, object-oriented design, cloud computing, and numerical computing, at Ferrara University and other schools. Martelli was also the keynote speaker for the 2008 SciPy Conference, and various editions of Pycon APAC and Pycon Italia conferences. - Wes McKinney is an American software developer and businessman. He was the CEO and founder of technology startup Datapad. He is the creator and "Benevolent Dictator for Life" (BDFL) of the open-source pandas package for data analysis in the Python programming language, and has also authored two versions of the reference book Python for Data Analysis.. McKinney is one of the co-creators of the Apache Arrow project. He worked as a software engineer for Cloudera following their acquisition of Datapad in 2014. He was a software engineer at Two Sigma Investments. He founded Ursa Labs.
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