Python is the most popular programming language nowadays. Based on my own experience, here is a list of advantages and limitations/drawbacks of Python:
Advantages:
1. Easy to learn: Simplicity makes the learning curve of Python is low. Basically one can pick it up from a few days to a few weeks.
2. Versatile: Python code can be found almost everywhere, such as web applications, desktop applications, data science, big data, spark, cloud, etc.
3. Flexible: Flexible syntax makes its code easy to write.
4. Python is a hybrid of several programming language types. It supports Object-oriented programming, Procedural programming, and Functional programming.
5. Generator is a very useful feature.
6. Python has a comprehensive ecosystem, supporting community, extensive libraries, and 3rd party modules.
Limitations or Drawbacks:
1. Some syntax brings inconvenience when writing code or even makes its code error-prone. Example A: Python code uses indentation to define scope, instead of brackets. Example B: If you want to call a function, the definition of the function must be defined before the caller, otherwise the function cannot be found.
2. Python is interpreted instead of compiled. You may modify code on-the-fly, but the result may be not what you expected, as the old code is cached.
3. Python is not strongly typed language. Type is determined at run-time only. Thus it is not type-safe before running.
4. As an interpreted programming language, Python’s performance is not as good as compiled ones, such as C-family languages (C, C++, Java, C#, etc.). Usually it is slower.
5. By design, there is no explicit pass-by-reference parameter. Although there are some mechanisms to mimic pass-by-reference implicitly, for example, use dictionary as a parameter. Such implicit pass-by-reference behavior may confuse people. People need to be very clear what data type is pass-by-value, and what data type is pass-by-reference.
6. If you want to write multi-threading code, probably Python is not a good choice for it.