Python 3 - Overview

Updated: 2022-04-04

Why Python

• Easy to learn.
• Available everywhere: Linux, macOS, Windows.
• Super popular in machine learning / data science, competing with R.
• help() gets docstring for any module / method / function.
• Simple, compact and powerful.
  • list comprehensions.
  • class magic methods.
  • very powerful OOP.
  • built-in strings and array slicing.
  • huge and coherent standard library.

globals() vs locals() vs vars()

• globals(): returns the dictionary of the module namespace
• locals(): returns a dictionary of the current namespace
• vars(): returns either a dictionary of the current namespace (if called with no argument) or the dictionary of the argument.

Resources

• functional programming
  • http://docs.python.org/howto/functional.html
• performance
  • http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSpeed/PerformanceTips
• best practice
  • http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/
  • http://www.fantascienza.net/leonardo/ar/python_best_practices.html