What can you do with python?

My work uses it because it's fast with algorithm testing, apparently.

I've heard its really slow compared to other languages.

It's apparently generally an easy language to learn and use. Maybe they want to replace Rails with this?

I hope not because I love me my Rails, but it's definitely been a crazy learning curve.

Hi, the Treehouse Python teacher here.

Basically, anything you can do with Perl, Java, Ruby, PHP, etc, you can do with Python. Sometimes it'll be easier, sometimes it won't. For lots of people, myself included, Python has a much faster on brain-to-code speed since it's very close to a spoken language (much like Ruby can be).

Python is pretty heavily used in the sciences and, since it's very small, is used on a lot of embedded systems. It also powers a lot of great frameworks for building web apps, games, or mapping. Basically, Python is a solid all-around workhorse of a language.

As for Python's speed overall, benchmarks are a really tricky beast :) Python isn't the fastest language ever but neither is Perl, PHP, or Ruby. It's fast enough for Disqus to do 45k transactions a second against it (with some healthy caching, as with any large web site/service).

We won't be replacing Rails with Django or Ruby with Python. Some people will prefer one over the other, others will want to know both. I think they generally work really well together.

Anyway, if you have questions, feel free to ask me. We're aiming to have the first Python course out in the last half of July.

That's Awesome Kenneth. Also congratulations on the job at treehouse. I learned a little bit of python through code academy. I thought it was really cool and extremely fast to learn, just i didn't know how to implement it in projects. So I kinda step away from it. But I really want to go back and learn some more. i cant wait for the python videos!