Python is a trending skill that is highly sought after in the Northern Ireland market. According to the Developer Survey by StackOverflow, Python was one of the most in-demand technologies of 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. As of 2021, it is ranked as the world's 2nd most popular programming language among professional software developers as well as the first most wanted programming language.
Last month, programming language Python celebrated its 30th anniversary. But without a team to maintain it, the language would likely have never have become as popular as it is today.
To find out more about the Python community, TechRadar Pro spoke to Pablo Galindo, a Bloomberg software engineer and one of the five members of the Python Steering Council.
He told TechRadar about the Python development model, the role of a CPython core developer, and how he sees the language progressing in the years to come.
See below a sample of the KEY Q&A's from TechRadars interview with Pablo Galindo, the man tasked with keeping the programming language on track...
What led you to Python and what has made you stick with it?
I have a background in Physics. As part of my Ph.D. studies in Granada into rotating black holes, I found myself doing a lot of work with computer simulations. I ended up getting deeper into the software side of things that way. Years later, I found that, in fact, physics and finance both utilize many similar high-performance computing techniques.
While I had experience with C, C++, and Fortran, what led me to Python was that it is so easy to start experimenting and doing things with the language. If you learn one piece of the programming language, you can connect it to the rest very easily. You can also expose some existing programs written in C, C++, and Fortran to Python as well. As the community participates in such a close feedback cycle with the language itself, it is constantly iterating.
What does being a CPython core developer involve?
And what do you consider to be your most significant contribution to the language?
Being a CPython core developer involves a considerable amount of responsibility. You are in charge of implementing new features, reviewing proposals from contributors, fixing bugs, taking care of infrastructure, and making sure that each new release is as stable as possible. In addition, you are also responsible for adhering to the values of the Python core development team and creating a diverse and respectful community. This last point is quite important and involves many “non-technical” skills in order to understand different points of view, backgrounds and cultures.
In my day job, I am part of the Python Infrastructure team at Bloomberg, which helps take care of the Python experience for the more than 2,000 engineers who are using it to code a variety of functions and analytics across the company’s products. In fact, we have over 100 million lines of Python code at Bloomberg.
Our engineers also participate in the Python ecosystem, contributing and even maintaining some open source projects, speaking at conferences, and even hosting events.
Alongside my work at Bloomberg, I was also recently elected onto the Python Steering Council, and I serve the Python community by contributing to the future of the language that way.
How do you see Python progressing in the future?
The data science tasks performed by mathematicians, physicists, and scientists all over the world often relies on Python. The usage of Python in the back-end of web services and other service-oriented architectures is also a very popular choice, and I can only see that growing in the future. The language not only offers new functionalities to help with these kinds of tasks with every iteration, but the syntax itself also changes to adapt to these usages. A good example of this is when Python added a new infix operator to make matrix multiplication much easier. It is quite difficult to predict how usage of the language will grow over time, but it seems that the adoption of Python for science and data engineering is still growing significantly, and the ecosystem of libraries is growing as well.
At the same time, it is also a very important gateway language for people who are being introduced to software development for the first time. Like any other developer community, the Python community often splits on issues. The needs and wants of different groups in relation to the language sometimes conflict with each other. An important part of my role is to understand these needs and helping to chart a course that best serves the needs of everyone – as well as the language itself.
To make sure that the language stays competitive in all of these areas, is important that we, the core developers, keep the language efficient and fast and make sure that the syntax evolves in a way that makes the language flexible and expressive, without being detrimental to those users who are learning the language for the first time. We go to significant efforts to make sure that Python remains as fast as possible – a particularly challenging problem given how dynamic the language already is – by implementing different sophisticated optimizations. We must also keep in mind that the language needs to remain as approachable as possible to newcomers, which we do by improving syntax errors and documentation.
Read the full article here:https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/python-turns-30-meet-the-man-tasked-with-keeping-the-programming-language-on-track
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