7 Popular Software Programs Written in Python

Python is a popular coding language for several reasons – it’s relatively easy to learn and read, has a massive library to help you solve many of your coding problems, and a very active and welcoming community of users.
Even if you have no idea what kind of language Python is, chances are you’re quite familiar with many programs that are written in Python. Here’s a list of some of the more popular ones:

YouTube

With over 4 million views per day and 60 hours of video uploaded every minute, YouTube has become one of the most visited sites on the planet. Python is used for different purposes all over the site and because of its speed, it allows for the development of maintainable features in record time. Every time you watch a video, you’re executing Python code.

Google

Python is recognized as an official language at Google and has been with them since the beginning. Its flexibility, rapid development, scalability and excellent performance are the reasons why Python is so actively used – in things such as system administration tools and lots of Google App Engines apps. Google has a strong relationship with the language and sponsors various Python conferences.

Instagram

Founded in 2010, Instagram has become one of the most popular photo / video sharing social media apps with over 300 million users. The app utilises many languages but it’s application servers are built using iterations of Python with Django as the web framework.

Reddit

An entertainment, social networking, and news site – all rolled into one.  It’s one of the biggest communities on the web and its registered users, people like you, provide the content. Originally written in Common Lisp, it was rewritten in Python in 2005 to gain greater development flexibility and access to Python’s plethora of code libraries.

Spotify

Spotify is a popular music streaming service and a big fan of Python – they use it in their back-end services and in data analysis. The Python module, Luigi, is used to power the Radio and Discover features, as well as the recommendations for people to follow. Speed is an important factor at Spotify and Python accomplishes this. Spotify is also active in the Python community and sponsors conferences.

Dropbox

Dropbox lives in the cloud – offering services in cloud storage, data management, file sharing, and client software. Originally, both the Dropbox server (running on the cloud) and desktop client software were primarily written in Python. Drew Houston, co-founder of Dropbox, considers Python one of his favorite languages due to its simplicity, flexibility, and elegance.

Quora

Got a question? You can ask it here – on just about any topic you can think of. The creators of Quora, who used to work for Facebook, chose Python because it’s expressive and quick to write. LiveNode, one of the internal systems that manages the display of content on the webpage, is partly written in Python.