Question

I have been learning online lot of programming stuff these days using online sites like Udacity, Coursera, Khan Academy etc. I see most of them offer understanding of programming, understanding of Web, or several other things through python as a example language. I also learned about google app engine and found python as one of the language other than java that is supported. It is actually surprising that other popular languages or i should say more familiar languages like java, php etc are not finding their place in this category. I am asking this question as i code and understand php and java. But to go thorough these online classes i need to build an understanding of python as well. So i want to understand if learning python and its entire set of features will be useful and what in python inspires online education site as their preferred language.

Answer 1

There are many reasons for why Python is so popular:

• It is easy to learn
• It has a very clean syntax
• It is good for scientific computations
• It can do many things, from desktop application to web programming
• It is available on most *nix systems by default
• It is available on many operating systems (Linux, Mac OS, Windows, …)
• It can be used together with C.

This list can go on and on … .