There are a lot of prerequisites to fully understanding what makes Python special. As we cover these things in the course, we will sometimes take a moment to compare Python to other programming languages. But here is a brief overview of some special things:

Python is a dynamically typed language, and it is strongly typed. We will cover these concepts more in later modules, but for now: weakly typed languages allow you to freely mix different types of data (like integers, floating point numbers, and strings), while strongly typed languages do not allow as much mixing. Dynamically typed languages try to figure out the types of variables while the program is running, while statically typed languages require programmers to specify the types of variables in code (so, in those languages, you must say that your variable is a string, or an integer, et cetera).

The Python community has a dictum called the principle of least astonishment. This principle suggests that Python code should be as close as possible to the way human beings think, expect, and communicate. Because of this, Python is generally considered to be a very human friendly language, relatively easy to learn, easy to write, and easy to read.

Most languages use symbols (such as brackets and parentheses) to organize pieces of code, and have very few rules about whitespace (i.e. spaces, line breaks, indentation). Python relies heavily on whitespace to organize code.

Python is considered a high level language, meaning there are a significant number of abstractions between Python code and machine instructions. It has support for object-oriented programming and functional programming (two ways of abstracting the sequential, line-by-line style), but the Python community is unusual for mostly preferring procedural programming (the sequential, line-by-line style).

Finally, Python has excellent built in libraries, which are extra tools for doing a variety of things. In most programming languages, it takes intermediate to advanced skills to make a simple web server, or to grab a web page and read it into a string. In Python, each of these things can be done in one line of code.