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Guido van Rossum, a Dutch computer scientist, who created the Python programming language in 1989, says that he didn’t set out to create a language that was intended for mass consumption. Nearly 30 years later, it is apparent that he has brought coding closer to ordinary people.
In the past 12 months Google users in America have searched for Python more often than for Kim Kardashian. The rate of queries has tripled since 2010, while inquiries after other programming languages have been flat or declining.
The two main advantages of Python are simplicity and flexibility. Thanks to its simple syntax and indented white spaces, it is easy to learn, read and share.
It's faithful users, Pythonistas, have added more than 145,000 packages to the Python Package Index, covering everything from astronomy to game development.
Thanks to its versatility, the Central Intelligence Agency has employed it for hacking, Pixar for producing films, Google for crawling web pages and Spotify for recommending songs.
The most popular packages are those for machine learning, which analyze large amounts of data in order to detect otherwise unrecognizable models.