Python is an interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language with dynamic semantics. It is very popular for Rapid Application Development, and acts well to connect existing components together.it is dynamic and versatile language being used across a variety of domains such as data science, Big data, cloud computing, web development, game development, etc.
Why Companies use Python
A wide range of financial institutions, tech companies, government agencies, and more are increasingly using python. The advantages of using python include-
- Python is easy to learn, flexible and extensible, which can reduce the time and the cost of a project. Now you can learn Python online by enrolling in Python certification training.
- Python is open source and free for all which helps in saving costs.
- Program maintenance is much easier with python.
- Python comes with a growing community support with currently 8 million python developers worldwide.
- It integrates well with other languages like C++ which makes it easy to integrate with preexisting code when a company wants to upgrade or add on.
Which Organizations are using Python-
Python has become a foundation language for many organizations. According to the Stackshare page for Python, there are 6,200 companies using Python currently. Some companies, like Netflix, Facebook, and Reddit have even released open-source Python frameworks and libraries. Python is used for a variety of tasks including back end development, behind huge social media platforms, in recommendation engines, crawling and indexing web pages, and connecting teams at large companies.
Some examples of organizations using it are discussed below.
1. Google
Google, from the very beginning, has been supporting python. The founders of Google followed – “Python where we can, C++ where we must.” This means that they used C++ for those parts of software that needed to be faster or where more memory control was required and python elsewhere where fast delivery and easy maintenance was required.
Web crawlers are programs that index the content of websites, and organize the websites in order of their ranking. So, they are the most important when google search works. Google rewrote its entire web crawlers in python. Other scripts written for Google in Perl or Bash were also rewritten in python. The reason for this is the ease of deployment and easy maintenance. Python is now one of the four official Google server-side languages that are allowed to be deployed to production.
2. Facebook
Python is the third most popular language at Facebook. Due to its is simplicity and easy of use, Facebook engineers use python to connect with their APIs. Other than this, python is also used to maintain libraries and infrastructure, hardware imaging, binary distribution, and operational automation. Teams typically maintain Python client libraries (generally Thrift) for their services, which provide simple and reliable interfaces for communication with other teams.
3. Instagram
Instagram is built on a foundation of python. Python is preferred as it is secure, scalable and simple. It is used for web development. In 2016, Instagram ran the world’s largest deployment of the Django web framework, which is written in Python. Django provides components for both the front end and back end applications.
4. Netflix
Netflix is a company that allows its engineers to choose the language they want to code in. There has been a huge increase in the number of applications for python. The main reasons for this are that it has rich standard libraries, python is easy to develop, an active development community, and a rich variety of third party libraries available to solve nearly any given problem.
Python is used for data analysis on the server side. It is also used in their Central Alert gateway. This is an app that processes alerts from anywhere. Python is also used in monkey apps used to track security changes and history.
5. Quora
Quora is a crowd sourced question and answer platform. At the time of its foundation, its founders chose python as their programming language, and implemented C++ for the performance critical sections. This decision was taken due to python’s ease of writing, readability, and it worked well with non python programs. Also, at that time, there were several good frameworks available including Django and Pylons.
6. Uber
Uber is a technology company that offers services such as car rides, food delivery, package delivery, etc. Its engineers use Python, Node.js, Go, and Java at the lower backend levels.
Uber, at the beginning, used two programming languages, Node.js for the Marketplace team, and Python was used everywhere else. Both languages are still used for most of the services running at Uber today.
7. Spotify
Spotify is a company that offers users to stream music for free. It is a huge proponent of python. It primarily uses python for data analysis and back end services. A large number of its services use ZeroMQ to communicate. 0MQ or Zero MQ is an open source networking library and framework that is written in Python and C++, among other languages. Luigi, a python module that syncs with Hadoop, is used for interpreting analytics which help in suggesting and recommendations for Spotify users. Python is preferred due to its fast development pipeline. Spotify uses over 6000 individual Python processes.
8. Industrial Light and Magic
Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) is a special effects company that was founded in 1975 by George Lucas to create the FX for Star Wars. Since then, they have been creating FX, and winning multiple awards for their work in movies and commercials. ILM chose python over other languages. It uses python for wrapping software components, to extend their standard graphics applications, tracking and auditing pipeline functionality, and maintaining a database of every image produced for each film.
Along with the major companies, python is also being used by many other organizations such as NASA, CIA, Internet of Things, etc., for its operations. It has become the most popular language, based on a popularity ranking. It also boasts of a growing community of over 8.2 million developers. So, python is definitely a language to watch out for currently and in the near future.
