#1 Python is efficient

 You can accomplish a lot with Python, sometimes in only a few lines of code. Its critics may consider Python’s execution speed problematic, but the benefits outweigh any performance concerns. Several modules, packages, and libraries exist to make our lives easier. Instead of writing lengthy, complex loops to parse and find patterns in text, you can import the regular expressions module to get the job done using very little code. Another example is Beautiful Soup, a library that many use for web scraping to extract data from HTML and XML files or web pages.

#2 Python has an active community

Python has a growing fan base that keeps it alive and thriving. Thanks to the large community of Python programmers, over 134,740 projects in the Python Package Index (PyPI) exist to serve all kinds of needs. The PyPI repository is like your hardware store, a place to go for the tools needed to implement and finish a project. I was surprised to find even a distribution to process MARC records. Unless you are a librarian, the chances are slim you have ever heard of a MARC record, which is a Machine-Readable Cataloging record used by most libraries.

#3 Python is simple

 With a shorter learning curve than other languages, say Java or C++, and understandable and readable syntax, you don’t need to be a programmer to start applying Python to everyday tasks. Python automatically takes care of things like garbage collection and even closes files, opened via the ‘with’ statement, for you. People starting out may also find the use of indentation to signify the start and end of loops, functions, classes and code blocks easier than tracking down the traditional opening and closing curly braces.

#4 Python is in academia

Academia is fueling the adoption of Python. Computer science curriculum now include Python as a core language requirement — unlike in the past where the focus was on applying Java, C, and C++ to formal coursework. Granted, programmers still need knowledge of these languages, but the rising demand for data science, machine learning, deep learning and artificial intelligence specialists is making Python the go-to tool.

#5 Python is on trend

Skills in data science and artificial intelligence are in high demand. Glass door ranks Data Scientist as the #1 best job in America for 2018, while artificial intelligence is touted as the future of technology. Python is fast becoming the preferred choice for data scientists and machine learning professionals. It carries a rich and robust set of libraries, such as numpy for machine learning, pandas for data wrangling and analysis, scikit-learn for data science and machine learning, tensorflow for machine learning, keras for deep learning and many others.