What: -
Python is a high-level object-oriented scripting language. It is designed in a user-friendly manner. Python uses simple English keywords, which is easy to interpret. It has less syntax complications than any other programming languages.
Why:--
Few points that favor Python over Java to use with Selenium.
1. Java programs tend to run slower compared to Python programs.
2. Java uses traditional braces to start and ends blocks, while Python uses
indentation.
3. Java employs static typing, while Python is dynamically typed.
4. Python is simpler and more compact compared to Java.
History:--
Python is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language. Created by Guido van Rossum and first released in 1991, Python has a design philosophy that emphasizes code readability, notably using significant whitespace. It provides constructs that enable clear programming on both small and large scales
Python was conceptualized in the late 1980s. Guido van Rossum worked that time in a project at the CWI, called Amoeba, a distributed operating system. In an interview with Bill Venners1, Guido van Rossum said: "In the early 1980s, I worked as an implementer on a team building a language called ABC at Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI). I don't know how well people know ABC's influence on Python. I try to mention ABC's influence because I'm indebted to everything I learned during that project and to the people who worked on it."
Guido Van Rossum published the first version of Python code (version 0.9.0) at alt.sources in February 1991. This release included already exception handling, functions, and the core data types of list, dict, str and others. It was also object oriented and had a module system.
Python version 1.0 was released in January 1994. The major new features included in this release were the functional programming tools lambda, map, filter and reduce, which Guido Van Rossum never liked.
Six and a half years later in October 2000, Python 2.0 was introduced. This release included list comprehensions, a full garbage collector and it was supporting unicode.
Python flourished for another 8 years in the versions 2.x before the next major release as Python 3.0 (also known as "Python 3000" and "Py3K") was released. Python 3 is not backwards compatible with Python 2.x. The emphasis in Python 3 had been on the removal of duplicate programming constructs and modules, thus fulfilling or coming close to fulfilling the 13th law of the Zen of Python: "There should be one -- and preferably only one -- obvious way to do it."
Some changes in Python 3.0:
- Print is now a function
- Views and iterators instead of lists
- The rules for ordering comparisons have been simplified. E.g. a heterogeneous list cannot be sorted, because all the elements of a list must be comparable to each other.
- There is only one integer type left, i.e. int. long is int as well.
- The division of two integers returns a float instead of an integer. "//" can be used to have the "old" behaviour.
- Text Vs. Data Instead Of Unicode Vs. 8-bit.
