Gaming, Images, Serial Ports, XML, Robots, and More

Python is commonly applied in more domains than can be mentioned here. For example, you can do:

 

 
  • Game programming and multimedia in Python with the pygame system
  • Serial port communication on Windows, Linux, and more with the PySerial extension
  • Image processing with PIL, PyOpenGL, Blender, Maya, and others
  • Robot control programming with the PyRo toolkit
  • XML parsing with the xml library package, the xmlrpclib module, and third-party extensions
  • Artificial intelligence programming with neural network simulators and expert system shells
  • Natural language analysis with the NLTK package

You can even play solitaire with the PySol program. You’ll find support for many such fields at the PyPI websites, and via web searches (search Google or http://www.python.org for links).

Many of these specific domains are largely just instances of Python’s component integration role in action again. Adding it as a frontend to libraries of components written in a compiled language such as C makes Python useful for scripting in a wide variety of domains. As a general-purpose language that supports integration, Python is widely applicable.