Why we use Python

Python is considered to be one of the easiest languages to learn for first-time programmers. Compared to other popular object-oriented languages such as C++ and Java, Python has the following major benefits for programmers:

Python has a huge open source community that drives forth the effort for continuous improvement of Python as a programming language. The Python community is also responsible for the development of a large amount of open library packages, which can be used to build applications that span from dynamic websites to complex data analysis applications, as well as the development of simple GUI-based applications to plot charts from complex math functions. The majority of Python library packages have systematically maintained the code that was obtained from the community with regular updates. The de facto repository that indexes the largest number of Python packages is PyPI (http://pypi.python.org). PyPI also provides simple ways to install various packages on your operating system, which will be covered in the upcoming section.

While working with the hardware platform, it is necessary to have some means of communication between the hardware and the computer that you are using for development. Among the common computer to hardware interfacing methods, serial- port-based communication is the most popular, and it is really simple to establish, especially for the Arduino platform. Python provides a library called pySerial that is really easy to use and quick to implement to interface a serial port. It is really simple to use similar libraries and Python's interactive programming abilities to rapidly test and implement your project ideas.

Nowadays, complex Internet of Things (IoT) applications not only require serial communication support, but they also need additional high-level features such as graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for operating systems, web interfaces for remote access, plots for data visualization, tools for data analysis, interfaces for data storage, and so on. Using any other programming language such as C++ or Java, the development of these features would require a large amount of programming effort due to the distributed and unorganized nature of the supporting tools. Thankfully, Python has been very successful at providing support for these types of applications for years. Python has a number of libraries to support the development of each of the features mentioned here, which are available through PyPI. These libraries are open source, easy to use, and widely supported by the community. This makes Python a language of choice for IoT applications. Additionally, Python also has support to create and ship your custom-built applications as libraries so that everyone else can also utilize them in their projects. This is a helpful feature if you are developing custom protocols, APIs, or algorithms for your own hardware products.

When do we use other languages

So, when should we not use Python for our projects? As mentioned earlier, Python is a dynamic language that reduces development time, but it also makes the execution of your code slower as compared to other static high-level languages such as C, C++, and Java. These static languages use a compiler to compile the code and create binaries that get executed during runtime, thereby increasing the runtime performance. When the performance of the code is more important than a longer development time and higher cost, you should consider these static languages. Some other drawbacks of Python include being memory heavy, not having the proper support for threading, and lacking data protection features. In short, we can say that even though Python provides quicker and easier ways for quick prototyping, we should consider other static high-level languages for development after we are done testing our prototype and we are ready to ship our product. Nowadays, this scenario is changing rapidly and companies have started utilizing Python for their industrial products.