List of Python software

Python is actively used by many people, both in industry and academia for a wide variety of purposes. Pythonology lists numerous Python success stories in many types of application and problem domains.

Major organizations using Python

Google uses Python for many tasks including the backends of web apps such as Gmail and Google Maps and for many of its search-engine internals.

Educational uses of Python

Python is getting more popular (2005) for teaching computer programming. Its strengths for teaching include its syntactic simplicity, flexible typing, and interactive interpreter.

Python uses far fewer symbols than languages like Java and C. For example blocks inside loops and IF statements are indicated by indentation rather than curly braces ({}), and the end of a line does not have to have a semicolon. Beginning students often have initial trouble with memorizing where curly braces and semi-colons go. With Python students can skip directly to the fun part of writing code that does something. Similarly, with Java, and C++, variables types must be declared before being used. That is not needed in Python which again allows students to quickly get to the interesting part of getting their program to do something.

The interactive interpreter is an extremely valuable aid to learning and experimentation. Learning-by-doing is about trying things out and seeing what happens. The faster you can get results from your experiment, the faster that learning produces results. Experience has shown that the interactive interpreter and lack of a compiler really speeds up the learning process, both for beginners and for pros who are learning a new library and such.

Software written in Python

BitTorrent, the original implementation and several derivatives
Chandler is a personal information manager including calendar, email, tasks and notes support that is currently under development. It has several speed issues.
Civilization IV videogame uses boost.python to allow the Python programming language access to many parts of the game (including the style and content of all interface screens)
Mailman, one of the more popular packages for running email mailing lists
MoinMoin, a popular wiki engine in Python
OpenRPG provides a virtual table on which to play Role Playing Games over the internet
Plone, a user-friendly and powerful open source Content Management System
Portage, the heart of Gentoo Linux. An advanced package management system based on the *BSD style ports system
Solipsis, a system for massively shared virtual world
Trac - bug/issue tracking database, integrated with MoinMoin wiki and Subversion source version control
Turbogears - An application framework composed of Cherrypy, SQLObject, MochiKit, and KID templates
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, a videogame, uses Python for game scripting
ViewCVS, a web-based interface for browsing CVS repositories
Zope, an object-oriented web-application platform. Zope includes an application server with an integrated object-oriented database and a built-in web-based management interface
Battlefield 2, is a first person shooter that uses python for its configuration scripts
Indian Ocean Tsunami Detector, a free mobile phone software for tsunami prediction.
EVE Online, is a space Multi Massive Online Role Playing Game, and is the Highest Ranked MMORPG on MMORPG.com

Packages for Python

The Python Cheese Shop and Vaults of Parnassus are two primary directories of hundreds of Python packages

matplotlib, http://matplotlib.sf.net ,an extension providing matlab-like plotting and mathematical functions
Numeric Python, a language extension that adds support for large, multi-dimensional arrays and matrices
SciPy, a library of scientific and numerical routines

Pygame http://www.pygame.org Python game development
Python Imaging Library, a module for working with images
PyGTK, http://www.pygtk.org/, a popular cross-platform GUI library based on GTK+; furthermore, other GNOME libraries also have bindings for Python
PyQt, another popular cross-platform GUI library based on Qt; as above, KDE libraries have bindings too
wxPython, a port of wxWidgets and a popular cross-platform GUI library for Python

PyObjC Python-Objective C bridge that allows one to write Mac OS X software in Python
py2exe Convert python scripts into standalone windows programs

CherryPy, a Python-powered web framework
Django, another Python-powered web framework
TurboGears, a web framework combining CherryPy, SQLObject, and Kid
ZODB a Python-specific object-oriented database
Cheetah, a Python-powered template engine and code-generation tool
mod_python, an Apache module allowing direct integration of Python scripts with the Apache web server
Quixote a framework for developing Web applications in Python
Twisted, a networking framework for Python

Python implementations

Python – The reference implementation, also known as CPython
Jython – Python coded in Java
IronPython – Python for .NET and Mono platforms
Boo – Python-based but with static typing, for .NET and Mono
Stackless Python - Python with coroutines
Psyco - not an implementation, but JIT compiler for CPython
PyPy – Python coded in Python
Parrot – Virtual machine being developed mainly as the runtime for Perl 6, but with the intent to also support dynamic languages like Python, Ruby, Tcl, etc. Can currently execute a subset of Python
Logix – Python alternate front-end with macros