Modern approaches to Python development

A deep understanding of the programming language of choice is the most important thing to harness as an expert. This will always be true for any technology. Still, it is really hard to develop a good software without knowing the common tools and practices within the given language community. Python has no single feature that could not be found in some other language. So, in direct comparison of syntax, expressiveness, or performance, there will always be a solution that is better in one or more fields. But the area in which Python really stands out from the crowd is in the whole ecosystem built around the language. Its community has, for years, polished the standard practices and libraries that help to create more reliable software in a shorter time.

The most obvious and important part of the mentioned ecosystem is a huge collection of free and open source packages that solve a multitude of problems. Writing new software is always an expensive and time-consuming process. Being able to reuse the existing code instead of reinventing the wheel greatly reduces the time and costs of development. For some companies, it is the only reason their projects are economically feasible.

Due to this reason, Python developers put a lot of effort on creating tools and standards to work with open source packages created by others. Starting from virtual isolated environments, improved interactive shells and debuggers, to programs that help to discover, search, and analyze the huge collection of packages available on PyPI (Python Package Index).