Python in Education

Open Extensibility

Despite the powerful simplicity of the core language, programmers

often need to reuse existing library modules of code to achieve a

common task. A library module is like a recipe book of instructions

for carrying out certain related tasks. It means programmers don’t

have to start from scratch or reinvent the wheel every time they

encounter a common problem.

While most programming languages have mechanisms to write and

reuse libraries of code, Python is especially blessed in having a large

and extensive standard library (built into the core language), as well

as a thriving ecosystem of third-party modules.

For example, a common task is to retrieve data from a website. We

can use the 

requests

 third-party module to download web pages

using Python:

>>> import requests

>>> response = requests.get('http://python.org/')

>>> response.ok

True

>>> response.text[:42]

'\n  

(This code tells Python that we want to use the requests library, gets

the HTML for 

Python’s home page

, checks that the response was a

success [it was] and displays the first 42 characters of the resulting

HTML document.)

Some modules, such as 

requests

, do one thing and do it exception‐

ally well. Other modules are organized into large libraries to create

application frameworks that solve many of the repetitive tasks

needed when writing common types of application.