With a large number of prebuilt libraries available to all users, Python is a great fit for Artificial Intelligence in web development – but what else makes it so appealing?
Here at Absolute Digital Media, we’re taking a closer look at the history of Python and the role of the programming language in AI.
What Is Python?
According to the Python Software Foundation, “Python is an interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language with dynamic semantics.”
“Its high-level built in data structures, combined with dynamic typing and dynamic binding, make it very attractive for Rapid Application Development, as well as for use as a scripting or glue language to connect existing components together.”
Due to this, the programming languages popularity is on the rise, saving the time of web developers.
History Of Python
Python was created by Guido Van Rossum, a Dutch programmer. While the coding language was first invented in the 1980s, it wasn’t released until 11 years later in 1991. On 16th October 2000, a new version of the coding language was released: Python 2.0, which contained a number of new features including the ‘cycle-detecting garbage collector’.
Since then, we have seen several other new releases and, for 16 consecutive years, Python has been ranking in the top 10 most popular programming languages in the TIOBE Programming Community Index. It also won Programming Language of the Year in 2007, 2010 and 2018.
Reasons For Choosing Python For AI Development Projects
There are several reasons to choose Python for your AI-based projects from there being less code to work with, to prebuilt libraries. Here’s why else Python is a good language for AI and Machine Learning:
Less Code
One of the major advantages of opting Python for AI development project is that there is less code to work with. To put this into perspective, compared to other programming languages such as Java, Ruby and Simula, the very first object-oriented programming language, Python can implement the same logic with a fifth of the total amount of code usually required.
While there are several algorithms involved in Artificial Intelligence, the ease of testing provided by Python makes it one of the most effective programming languages among competitors. Python makes it much easier to execute the required codes and, as a result, it takes less time to complete a job.
Flexibility
Due to Python being a dynamically typed language, it is very flexible. In short, this means that there are no ‘hard rules’ outlining how features should be built.
Python also offers more flexibility when it comes to solving problems, which is great for beginners and experienced web developers alike.
Popularity
In addition to being the best fit for artificial intelligence in web development, the language is easy to learn as a result of the syntax being shorter compared to other programming languages such as Java. Due to this, Python is becoming increasing popular across the world from small businesses, to marketing agencies who take care of clients’ websites.
It’s also easy to install and, according to the Python Software Foundation, “nowadays many Linux and UNIX distributions include a recent Python”, making it more straightforward to get started.
Prebuilt Libraries
Whether you are an experienced web developer or have been asked to lead your business next AI development project, you can benefit from Python’s prebuilt libraries. Some of the libraries which can help you implement AI include:
NumPy – Besides its obvious scientific uses, NumPy can also be used as an efficient multi-dimensional container of generic data.
Tensorflow – TensorFlow is an open source software library for high performance numerical computation. Its flexible architecture allows easy deployment of computation across a variety of platforms (CPUs, GPUs, TPUs), and from desktops to clusters of servers to mobile and edge devices.
ELI5 – ELI5 is a Python package which helps to debug machine learning classifiers and explain their predictions.
Pandas – Pandas is a Python package providing fast, flexible, and expressive data structures designed to make working with structured (tabular, multidimensional, potentially heterogeneous) and time series data both easy and intuitive.
Theano – Theano is a Python library that allows you to define, optimise, and efficiently evaluate mathematical expressions involving multi-dimensional arrays.
Other libraries such as Norvig can be used to implement algorithms in artificial intelligence, helping to save valuable time.
Support
As an open source programming language, python is popular among web developers and individuals looking to learn more about the language alike. Due to this, there are several resources available to assist in solving problems – and fast.
While AI is becoming increasingly popular and more complex, Python is making Artificial Intelligence based projects easier to complete. With shorter codes to write and a number of prebuilt libraries to utilise, users no longer have to spend valuable time developing their own scripts.
How We Use Python
As an award-winning, full-service digital marketing agency, it’s important that we keep up to date with the latest coding languages. We use Python throughout our projects including to automate the datamining process. In short, this allows us to easily highlight user behaviors and create shorter codes for repetitive tasks, meaning that these do not need to be created manually.
By using Python, we are also able to effectively monitor our campaigns. Python allows us to monitor our ads in a number of ways including how many clicks and conversions they generate. We can also identify the effectiveness of these campaigns, which enables us to ensure that each of our strategies will provide the required results.
In addition, Python can also help to improve search engine optimisation. The simple coding language enables us to identify several factors that are related to SEO such as meta descriptions, robot text files, duplicate content and 404 errors. With all this information, we can easily resolve any issues found on a site without having to manually find them.