A walk through Python — a cheat sheet of sorts

There are many many coding languages. For front-end web development, I use Javascript (and HTML/CSS). For almost everything else, Python is typically my language of choice (other than some Java and C# for generative art).

Why?

Python offers many advantages:

• (Almost) As easy as English
• Very very flexible — c.f. R, or Matlab. Python is an all purpose language. Something developed in the course of data analysis could easily be adapted and deployed as a desktop or web application.
• Libraries, libraries, libraries, which really cuts down the time needed for achieving what you need.

But, nothing is perfect. There are some things to note:

• Not pre-compiled, but interactive
• Can be slow, but can be (partially) overcome with the use of certain libraries
• Python is dynamically typed. This means that there is no need to declare a specific for each variable that is used. Python will automatically assign

The other really key advantage of Python is that we can use Jupyter notebooks. Each Jupyter notebook is an environment within which we can write scripts, and provide comments to explain each line of the script.

So for this (gentle introduction) to Python, we will be using a Jupyter notebook.

The Jupyter notebook with the code is here