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Python Start • Feb 25, 2017

7 Brilliant Python Examples You Should Know

Python is a powerhouse. Here are 7 real-world examples to prove it.

Perhaps you have heard that Python is the programming language of choice for many developers, but perhaps you are wondering who really uses it and what they build with Python. Here are 7 examples of Python's impressive versatility:
  1. Pinterest - Now a social media magnet, attracting Google Execs, Pinterest's humble start is rooted in Python. "When we first started building Pinterest, we used Python as our development language, which helped us build quickly and reliably. Over the years we built many tools around Python, including Pinball, MySQL_utils and pymemcache, as well as a set of libraries used daily for service communication and configuration management." - Shu Zhang, Pinterest engineer, Infrastructure (Medium)
  2. YouTube - YouTube has grown to become a household name and "its most famous star, PewDiePie, makes approximately $15 million a year through his following of more than 50 million, according to Forbes." (The Witchita Eagle) "Python is fast enough for our site and allows us to produce maintainable features in record times, with a minimum of developers." - Cuong Do, Software Architect, YouTube.com (Python.org)
  3. NASA - The TkInter module is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) toolkit for Python. TkInter was used extensively in NASA's Workflow Automation System (WAS). "Python allows us to tackle the complexity of programs like the WAS without getting bogged down in the language." - Robin Friedrich, Senior Project Engineer, United Space Alliance -- NASA's main shuttle support contractor. (Python.org)
  4. Industrial Light & Magic (Lucasfilm, Walt Disney) - ILM has forumlated billions of lines of code to support 300+ movies and Rogue One recently earned an Oscar nomination for its special effects. "Python plays a key role in our production pipeline. Without it a project the size of Star Wars: Episode II would have been very difficult to pull off. From crowd rendering to batch processing to compositing, Python binds all things together." - Tommy Burnette, Senior Technical Director, Industrial Light & Magic. (Python.org)
  5. Dropbox - Dropbox now has over half a billion users around the world. via Dropbox blog "[Python has] helped [Dropbox] stay lean and the product remain simple as it [scaled] to let over 100 million users save over 1 billion files per day." (TechCrunch)
  6. Google - "Python has been an important part of Google since the beginning, and remains so as the system grows and evolves. Today dozens of Google engineers use Python, and we're looking for more people with skills in this language." - Peter Norvig, director of search quality at Google, Inc. (Python.org)
  7. EA Games (Electronic Arts) - One of the reasons Battlefield 2 remained so popular, was its support for mods written in Python (FZ). Python has been used by game developers as early as Earth & Beyond. (Sean Riley's Game Programming With Python
Do you know of other noteworthy Python examples? Please tweet them to us at @StartPython.
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