Python?

[Zeuge]

In many of the recent job postings I've seen, knowledge of python is desired (sometimes C++ isn't even mentioned). Is this a recent trend or are there certain kinds of employers that just prefer python?

 

[Barny]

There are things you can do with Python that you would be mad to do with C++. As always, to be a good programmer you need to know more than one language. To be frank, Python is the most awesome general purpose language ever built. There are so many things you can do, and you can code it quickly, and it will run pretty damn quick, especially if you use Cython.

 

[mysterion]

As always, to be a good programmer you need to know more than one language.

+1
And if you have already coded in one language, the learn curve will be smaller to learn another language. The most programming languages have the same things like functions, variables, constants, structures, libs, maybe objects, etc. Only the art of write the code structure is most another and sometimes they've new features for purposes they're written. E.g. python or ruby have advances in fast prototyping because avoid of compilation time.

 

[quantstart]

I made use of Python extensively in a former role. I was interacting a lot with the web to obtain data. There are some great libraries for that sort of thing, including Beautiful Soup and Python Requests (used instead of the horrible urllib2 library).

It is very straightforward to interact with a datastore (I was hooking up to MySQL), prototype up models and then optimise them (via NumPy/SciPy). You might even find that you never need to code them up in C++, depending upon your needs.