The use of C/C++ programming language for controlling hardware, development of system software is common practice over the years. Now due to wide acceptance of Python as common language for AI and machine learning domains, the popularity of python has increased tremendously. With increased popularity and user base hardware platforms like Raspberry Pi started giving python libraries for controlling hardware like GPIOs etc. Due to availability for different frameworks for web and Hardware python is being widely used for Raspberry pi kinds of platforms.
But hardware, robotics and IoT hobbyists who work on microcontroller platforms line Arduino zero, Mbed, stm32, ESP8266 etc has to use C programming. To bridge the gap of python on low computing devices which can not run Embedded Linux kind of operating systems Micropython is developed.
Micropython is python implementation for micro-controllers and low computing power devices. Micropython is based on python 3.
Micropython can be downloaded from https://micropython.org/download/ . Micropython supports different boards like pyboard, esp8266, esp32 and few other boards.
We recently got BBC micro:bit. This board can also be programmed with Micropython.