Python is a great object-oriented, interpreted, and interactive programming language. It is often compared (favorably of course :-) ) to Lisp, Tcl, Perl, Ruby, C#, Visual Basic, Visual Fox Pro, Scheme or Java... and it's much more fun. Python combines remarkable power with very clear syntax. It has modules, classes, exceptions, very high level dynamic data types, and dynamic typing. There are interfaces to many system calls and libraries, as well as to various windowing systems. New built-in modules are easily written in C or C++ (or other languages, depending on the chosen implementation). Python is also usable as an extension language for applications written in other languages that need easy-to-use scripting or automation interfaces.

Python programs are typically 3-5 times shorter than equivalent Java programs. This difference can be attributed to Python's built-in high-level data types and its dynamic typing. For example, a Python programmer wastes no time declaring the types of arguments or variables, and Python's powerful polymorphic list and dictionary types, for which rich syntactic support is built straight into the language, find a use in almost every Python program. Because of the run-time typing, Python's run time must work harder than Java's. For example, when evaluating the expression a+b, it must first inspect the objects a and b to find out their type, which is not known at compile time. It then invokes the appropriate addition operation, which may be an overloaded user-defined method. Java, on the other hand, can perform an efficient integer or floating point addition, but requires variable declarations for a and b, and does not allow overloading of the + operator for instances of user-defined classes. For these reasons, Python is much better suited as a "glue" language, while Java is better characterized as a low-level implementation language.

Python shows a 2.27% rise over its position a year ago, which contrasts with a decline of -4.47% for Java over the same period (IEEE rankings) According to Jetbrains "The State of Developer Ecosystem 2020" survey, Python is the 4rth most Used programming language and it will propably take SQL's 3rd place next year.