For the past nine years, Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer website for programmers, has polled developers to understand what technologies they are using and to find out what technologies they want to work with next. This year, the nearly 90,000 survey participants revealed that, once again, Python has risen in the ranks of language popularity.
Python earned fourth place, edging out Java and underscoring the claim that it is the fastest-growing programming language in use today. SQL, a standardized language used to work with relational databases, came in third.
Taken together, these results highlight not only the need to know Python, but also the need to be able to use Python and SQL together in application development. Two audiences will benefit greatly from learning how to connect the two: developers wanting to use information in a SQL database; and SQL database users wanting to learn how to get value out of data with Python applications.
Python is popular in part because it’s open source. Anyone can download and use it to develop applications. And this can be done on a wide variety of platforms, including Microsoft Windows, macOS, and most Linux distributions. Applications written on one platform can easily be executed on another.
Another reason the language is appealing is that Python code is easy-to-read and thus easy to learn and maintain. Python has a relatively simple structure, and its syntax is clearly defined. It uses English keywords where other languages rely on punctuation. There are no curly braces to balance or semicolons to remember—indentation is used to mark where code blocks begin and end.
Python also uses libraries to provide functionality, which helps keep the core language simple and lightweight. Developers only need to add a basic set of libraries to their code to get the functionality they desire. Python is also very flexible. It can be used with functional, object-oriented, and imperative coding styles, making it useful to different types of programmers.
At the most basic level, an application is a computer program that has been designed to perform a group of coordinated operations to solve a particular problem. Applications are usually constructed around five basic elements:
Input is defined as the way an application receives the information it needs to produce solutions for the problems it has been designed to solve. Once the appropriate input is received, logic takes over and controls what information should be placed in or taken out of memory and what arithmetic operations should be performed on that information. Because data placed into or taken out of memory is not persistent and can be lost if not stored elsewhere, a simple application might interact with the operating system to move data to and from a character- or byte-oriented file. Then, when the application has generated a solution to the problem it was designed to solve, it provides output in the form of an answer or specific action.
