There is a very useful programming language that many programmers, software engineers, and other people with technical experience utilize on a regular basis known as Python. It is a good high-level programming language that can be used for many situations and types of software. It has also been around for a long time with the language first appearing in 1991 (as shown in this archive that can be found here: https://www.tuhs.org/Usenet/alt.sources/1991-February/001749.html), meaning that there has been a long-time for the community around Python to work out most issues that the program language has & make sure that it is optimal for most programmers to use. You can also use it to work with multiple file extensions like .py, .pyi. .pyc, .pyd, and .pyz.
It is very good at working with machine learning and basic artificial intelligence models. Python is also widely used in the development of blockchains and other kinds of databases & decentralized ledgers. However, to get the most out of a programming language like Python you need to be able to add new libraries and dependencies. For example, if you want to be able to create websites and web pages using Python, you will need a Python package known as Flask. To install tools like Flask and other packages and dependencies to increase what you can get out of Python, you will need to install a program for the language called pip. Pip was generally used for package management and package installation too. Many versions of Python now come with pip (in fact, it comes pre-installed with Python 2.7.9 and any versions of Python that come afterwards) & you can check if you properly have a version of pip installed using the command pip -v. Old versions require installing pip and to do that, you will need to go to pip-installer.org and follow the instructions for installing pip to this older version of Python. There is also a built-in help module that can give you more information on how to use pip that can be shown if you run the command pip help.
You can also install different Python distributions that can come with pip pre-installed such as Anaconda. The Python distribution called Anaconda is a version of Python that is mainly used for data science. It comes with its own unique custom package manager called conda. However, it is ok if you do not want to use conda because Anaconda also includes & supports pip, so it is the best of both worlds. Pip comes with the most popular operating systems. You can get it and Python on Windows, Mac, and Linux distributions. Now, as part of the best practice to work with pip and python, you should use pip from a folder known as a virtual environment. Why would it be preferable to use a virtual environment instead of just using a system-wide install for pip? This is because a system-wide installation of pip generally can cause conflicts with system dependencies and produce multiple projects with conflicting dependencies. But either way, you could pretty much turn pip into a proper Python companion that turns a small programming language into a powerful software development tool...
