5 Reasons to Learn Python in 2023

Why learn Python in 2023? There are many reasons, some related to career and earnings, others to personal development. In this article, I will demonstrate why learning Python should be one of your New Year’s resolutions.

You got here because you’re wondering why you should start learning Python. Maybe you haven't made up your mind yet and you’d like to get more facts. This is the first sign that you may become a programmer – we call it the analytical mindset. First the data, then the results.

In this article, I have gathered some arguments to help you answer the question of whether you should learn Python. Here are my five reasons why Python is worth learning.

5 Reasons Why Python Is Worth Learning

1. Python Is Easy to Learn

Python is a perfect fit for a first programming language. If you are completely unfamiliar with Python or only at the very beginning of your learning journey, don’t worry! The Python programming language is very intuitive and its learning curve for beginners is relatively small.

If you want to start learning Python online, I highly recommend you take a look at our Python Basics mini-track. It will give you a solid foundation for your programming journey. At the time of writing this article, the first part of the Python track, Python Basics: Part 1 is completely free. This awesome interactive course will help you find out if programming is for you.

What makes Python so beginner friendly? First of all, Python enforces good coding practices. It emphasizes syntax readability, inducing you to write clean code with consistent indentation and avoiding redundancies (e.g. useless parentheses or brackets). Python is strongly typed, which prevents you from mixing different data types and thus helps you avoid possible compilation errors. Let’s take a look at the following Python function:

def sumListValues(my_list):
int total = 0
    	for element in my_list:
      	total = total + element

	return total

The function above reads every element of a list of numbers and returns the total. Pretty simple to understand at first glance, right?

Then, Python gives us some awesome built-in functions that make our daily developer life easier. The previous code could have been written in only one line with the sum built-in function:

def sumListValues(my_list):
	return sum(my_list)

Awesome, right? Let’s consider the following example with the range built-in function:

my_list = list(range(5))
print(my_list)
# Shows: [0, 1, 2, 3, 4]

The code above creates a list containing sequential values using just one line of code, making everything clean and concise.

Finally, there are a lot of awesome free IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) like Pycharm or VS Code that allow you to program in Python and compile your code in a very easy way. Forget the old text editors; modern Python IDEs will help you to write the clean code encouraged by PEP 8 guidelines.

Example of Python programming with PyCharm

2. Python Devs Are In-Demand and Well-Paid

If you take a look at Google Trends with Python as a search term, you’ll notice that interest in Python has been constantly increasing over the last decade:

According to Stack Overflow, Python is one of professional developers' most wanted programming languages in 2022. Almost 18% of developers who are not developing with Python have expressed interest in developing with it. That’s a lot!

Why is Python so trendy? Python was popular as a scripting language in the 1990s and early 2000. It’s currently living a second life with the increased importance of data science and machine learning. Almost all modern tech companies, including Google and Netflix, use Python.

If you are concerned about professional opportunities, don’t worry: Python offers a large choice of career paths. These range from software developers to ethical hackers and include data scientists. According to ZipRecruiter, the national average for a Python developer is over $110,000 per year in the United States. Not bad!

If you are interested in becoming a data scientist, I highly recommend the mini-track Python for Data Science on LearnPython.com. It lays the programming foundations needed to start working in the field of data science. After completing it, you’ll be able to write simple data processing scripts and data visualizations. You will be prepared to further your education in programming, in Python, or in another language of your choice.

3. You Can Do Everything with Python

Python is a general-purpose programming language: it is used for AI and machine learning, web development, data analytics, game development, and financial predictive models, among others. Python is one of the most common languages data scientists use to clean data, visualize it, and build machine learning models.

A great example of a data model is in the field of fraud detection. Historical data is analyzed, processed, and segmented to find associations and rules. These are used to deduce a pattern that could prevent future acts of fraud.

Python is also used as a scripting language; scripts can be executed on the server through command lines without being previously compiled. This allows for lightweight and fast automation tasks. For example, you can periodically run a script to inactivate website users who have yet to renew their membership after several notifications.

Python is often used for test automation. Test cases are easy to create and there are great testing libraries such as unittest or pytest that are readily available.

4. The Python Community Is Awesome

Python has a vast and friendly developer community that constantly contributes to creating new libraries and features. Plenty of amazing and free Python packages and libraries can be found on the official repository PyPI. One of the most famous Python libraries, NumPy, is the result of the Python community. This library, which allows working with big data structures, is now an essential tool for data scientists.

Python also has outstanding web and app development frameworks like Django and Flask that are easy to understand and well documented.

If you are stuck programming in Python, don’t worry. You will probably find the answer you need on Q&A platforms like Stack Overflow, where thousands of anonymous heroes help each other every day. Stack Overflow has more than 2 million questions related to Python, so chances are someone else has tackled a problem like yours!

5. Python Has Lots of Learning Resources

If you want to learn Python, you will find an almost infinite number of resources and learning methods. In addition to the official documentation, you can read books or watch tutorials and YouTube videos, among many other options.

However, I recommend you learn Python through an interactive online course. This not only gives you knowledge, it also gives you the opportunity to put it into practice. You can read many books or watch many clips on YouTube, but only writing real code will grow your skills. The easiest and fastest way to write code while learning is through interactive courses. And you will need a lot of practice to become an expert!

Example of an interactive exercise on LearnPython.com

Learn Python Today!

Did this article encourage you to learn Python? Then don’t hesitate! Your Python journey has just begun; you will find all the resources and help you need to become an expert. I strongly recommend this awesome track on LearnPython.com: it introduces you to the fundamentals of programming with Python.

So, what are you waiting for? Learn Python today!