Every programming language has its own significance and uses in the design and development cycle of applications. Python has witnessed explosive growth as one of the most popular languages among developers and enterprises. To back-up this claim, we have gathered some information from reliable sources. Let's have a look.
1. The traffic growth rate of Python
Stack Overflow is a reliable website that engages 40 million users per month, out of which 17 million users are software developers, IT professionals and aspiring engineers. Have a look at the research and claims by Stack Overflow.
- According to the Stack Overflow website, the questions with a Python tag have the maximum number of views in 2018 in high-income countries, such as the US, Germany, etc. The given image shows the tremendous growth of Python in the last 5 years.
- Other research by Stack Overflow shows that from January 2016 to August 2017, the traffic growth rate of Python increased by 27%. While for JavaScript, C++, Ruby, iOS, etc., the growth rate has declined as compared to the past few years.
Some other languages such as Rust, R, and Go have faster growth than Python in the last year. However, their monthly traffic growth from the last 5 years (since 2012) is lesser than Python. Let's have a look at the image showing their monthly traffic growth.
2. Since last year, Python has shown the growth rate by 456%
Forbes, in their research and analysis of ‘technical skills with huge demand’ list, has put Python seventh on the list, with a 456% growth rate last year. The reason behind the huge demand for Python is that Python is easy to learn and understand. Also, its code takes less time to develop than any other programming language, speeding up the development process. With Python, developers can develop applications more quickly.
3. Python ranked at the top in the list of ‘top programming languages in 2019’
IEEE Spectrum (world’s largest professional organization dedicated to applied science and engineering) has ranked Python at the top of the list of ‘top programming languages in 2019’. Their research includes gathering data from different reliables sources for certain metrics and then merging the data in an app in order to adjust the rank given to each metric, providing you the correct and assured results.
4. Top industry leaders who use Python
- Instagram
Instagram is a popular photo-sharing site that has 1 billion monthly active users. Instagram is built on Django, the popular Python framework. Django is a powerful web development framework based on Python that has a robust codebase. It provides a wide variety of libraries, tools, and API to develop web applications quickly.
Applications built on Django are:
- Highly secured
- Extremely fast
- Highly flexible, robust and scalable
- Netflix
Python is the most suitable language for artificial intelligence and machine learning. It is extensively used for numeric and scientific applications. This is the reason Netflix uses Python in its analytics and recommendation engine that enables it to provide suggestions for movies and series to its users. - IBM
IBM uses Python in its big data and analytics tool, known as IBM Watson. Also, the web server that can be deployed in IBM Bluemix (a cloud as a service platform by IBM) is written in Python. - Facebook
According to the official blog post of Facebook:
- At Facebook, Python is the most commonly used language among Facebook engineers.
- After PHP and C++, it is considered as the third most liked language at Facebook.
- Facebook engineers maintain and build thousands of Python binaries and libraries in order to deploy across the entire Facebook infrastructure.
- 21% of Facebook’s infrastructure codebase consists of Python.
- Many Facebook engineers use Python services and utilities for their everyday tasks, including operational automation, hardware imaging, infrastructure management and more.
Google has used Python in:
- Most of its search algorithms, code review tools, log analysis, etc.
- Its developer hosting website developers.google.com/.
- Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and robotics projects.
- YouTube applications
5. TIOBE index for programming languages from 1989 to 2019
The TIOBE index community indicates the popularity of various programming languages. It measures the popularity of programming languages by analyzing the number of expert engineers worldwide, third-party vendors and courses offered. It uses popular search engines, including Bing, Google, Yahoo and more to assess and evaluate ratings.
The given TIOBE research shows the positions held by different programming languages from the year 1989 to 2019. In this, we can see the incredible growth of the Python programming language. In the year 1989, Python did not hold any position in the TIOBE index. It was not popular at that time. In 1994, Python managed to hold the 21st position. Then, with the passing years, its demand has kept on increasing. In 2019, it holds the 3rd position in the TIOBE index for programming languages.
6. Future traffic of Python will overtake the other popular programming languages.
According to Stack Overflow predictions, Python will continue to lead. The traffic of Python tags will be higher than other popular programming languages, such as Java, JavaScript, PHP, C, and C++. They have also predicted that Java and JavaScript will have a similar amount of traffic that they have from the last 2 years.
Conclusion
Python has shown amazing growth in the last few years. But we are not looking to come up with any “language war”. Every programming language has its own pros and cons. There are some challenges in the Python language that can be addressed by other programming languages such as Java, JavaScript, etc., and vice versa. The purpose of this article is to let you know how the developer ecosystem has changed over the years and how Python has emerged as a popular and versatile programming language.