Developers wanting to use Python on Windows now have an easier way to get it up and running after an update to Windows 10.

Writing on the Microsoft developer blog, software engineer Steve Dower said:

"Microsoft has been involved with the Python community for over twelve years, and currently employ four of the key contributors to the language and primary runtime. The growth of Python has been incredible, as it finds homes among data scientists, web developers, system administrators, and students, and roughly half of this work is already happening on Windows. And yet, Python developers on Windows find themselves facing more friction than on other platforms."

In practical terms, what Microsoft has done is to put a Python link into Windows so that if a would-be Python developer clicks on it, they're taken to the Python distribution in the Windows store. 

The distribution on the Windows store is a release that is fully maintained by the community, installs easily on Windows 10, and automatically makes common commands such as python, pip and idle available. It also has equivalents with version numbers python3 and python3.7, for all the commands.

The fact that Microsoft is providing an easier route to Python on Windows, and making that an independent community release even though there's a version of Python as an extension to Microsoft's own Visual Studio Code is a sign not just of Python's importance, but how Microsoft is adapting to a changing developer world. As Dower said in the blog post:

"While Visual Studio remains a great starting point for any workload on Windows, many developers now prefer to acquire tools individually and on-demand."

You can find the distribution in the Windows Store.

Easy access to Python is only going to spur it on its way to being the dominant language within the next 4 years or so as we reported yesterday, see Python Set To Be Top Language

• Mike James is the author of Programmer's Python: Everything is an Object published by I/O Press as part of the  I Programmer Library. With the subtitle "Something Completely Different" this is for those who want to understand the deeper logic in the approach that Python 3 takes to classes and objects.

More Information

Python For Windows Instructions

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