Python is one of the simplest languages to start coding with, yet it is used in some of the most challenging problems in the world. And this is not a coincidence. When you already have a challenging task in your hands, you will want to use the simplest tools that allow you to focus on the problem itself, rather than spending time and effort on the complex tools.
Python is currently used in Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Quantum Computing, Cybersecurity as well as in Back-End Web Development, Web Scraping, Automation and Testing.
Artificial Intelligence is essentially creating intelligent behaviour artificially, in machines. Currently, the most successful way to create artificial intelligence is machine learning, and more specifically, deep learning. Machine learning is sometimes referred to as ‘software 2.0’ and it is for a good reason.
Machine learning is essentially a different way of programming computers. Rather than explicitly programming everything we want our program to do in every single scenario, we are creating a model that can learn from the data we feed it and train that model with the provided data. As the model is trained, it approximates the results you want, without being explicitly programmed.
Currently, two of the most popular machine learning libraries are PyTorch and TensorFlow.
Python is also widely used in robotics and IOT (Internet of Things). Currently two of the most popular robotics platforms to start with are Raspberry Pi and NVIDIA Jetson Nano. By using either one, you can start developing your own robotics systems that can collect data from the environment, interact with the environment and connect to the internet when necessary.
If you choose to go with the NVIDIA Jetson Nano, it also comes with powerful artificial intelligence computing capabilities. If you want to turn your personal robotics projects into a business, you can also upgrade your Jetson Nano to industrial versions as well, which can allow you to provide robotics services professionally with 5–10 year industrial use lifetime.
Quantum Computers are computers that leverage quantum physics to achieve massive compute power with very little computational resources. What most people don’t know is that you can actually program a quantum computer right now, from your laptop, using Python. Companies like AWS, Google, IBM, D-Wave Systems allow you to program and run quantum circuits in their actual quantum computers or in simulations of quantum systems.
Python is also widely used in back-end web development. This is the code that runs on the servers on the internet. Two of the most popular backend web development frameworks that use Python are Django and Flask. Django provides you with more comprehensive development tools while Flask is more lightweight and flexible.
Web scraping is essentially collecting data from the internet in an automated fashion. You can create scripts that will go to websites and download data from them. Once you get the data you want, you can perform computations and run analysis on them to serve different business functions.
One thing you should know is that websites do not want you to scape everything from them. They often have certain guidelines on what you should and should not scrape from them. To find out what they allow, you can go to the website you want to scrape data from and add ‘/robots.txt’ to the end of the website url.
Another place where python is widely adopted is automation and testing. When you write a program, one of the things you want to do is to make sure it works as expected across different devices and scenarios. For example, if you are creating a web app, you can use Selenium to test your website for different inputs to make sure that you are getting the right outputs. You can also use Selenium to make sure that all your buttons and titles are displaying correctly in all the popular browsers.
The list goes on but the point is that rather than hiring hundreds of people to test your software under different conditions, you can automate this process using Python.
Ethical hacking is intentionally trying to hack into a system, in order to check its vulnerabilities. You can do this for your own software or someone else’s that you made a contract with, to check their security system. The major goal is to find the potential security vulnerabilities in a system before an actual hacker does, so you can fix them and protect the software from outside hackers.