What is Python?
Python is an object-oriented interpreted language that is designed to be easy to use and to aid Rapid Application Development. This is achieved by the use of simplified semantics in the language.
Python was born at the end of the 1980's, towards the very end of December 1989 by the Dutch developer, Guido van Rossum. A majority of the design of the language is aimed at clarity and simplicity and one of the main rules of the Zen of Python is:
"There should be one, and preferable only one, obvious way to do it."
Often systems will have both Python 2 and Python 3 installed; however, all newer distributions are switching to Python 3. We will be working with Python 3, it being the latest version installed on the Raspberry Pi.
Although, there is no shell, we can interact with Python using REPL: read, evaluate, print, and loop. We can access this by typing python3
in the command line. You should see something similar to the following screenshot:
We can see that we are...