Dive Brief:
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Netflix relies heavily on Python, using the programming language for its "full content lifecycle," including tasks like security automation and training machine learning models for its recommendation algorithms, according to a Netflix Technology Blog Tuesday.
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Netflix detailed its Python use ahead of the annual conference PyCon 2019, which starts Wednesday. Of major programming languages, Python is the fastest growing, according to Stack Overflow's 2019 Developer Survey of almost 90,000 global developers.
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The company uses the Metaflow Python framework to easily execute machine learning projects through production, according to Netflix. "We leverage well parallelized and optimized Python code to fetch data at 10Gbps, handle hundreds of millions of data points in memory, and orchestrate computation over tens of thousands of CPU cores."
Dive Insight:
Heavy use by Netflix, an engineering giant known for a robust recommendation engine, is a nod to the capabilities of a programming language.
Considered a general purpose programming language, Python has steadily climbed the index of most-used languages. More than 40% of programmers use Python, the fourth most popular programming language, behind JavaScript, HTML/CSS and SQL, according to Stack Overflow.
As a programming language gains popularity, more engineers and developers will look to weave it into a company's technology backbone. Almost three-quarters of Stack Overflow respondents "love" the language. For the third year in a row, it is the most-wanted language and those who don't use it, would like to learn it.
There are scores of programming languages, but Python proves appealing because of its simple syntax rules and the readability of the code, according to a Medium post by Mindfire Solutions.
It is also a general purpose programming language, so developers can create develop applications for desktop and web.
