As long as ZAPIs are included in ONTAP releases, NMSDK would continue to exist and provide language bindings.
For new ONTAP features in upcoming releases post 9.6 , support for these new ONTAP features will be in RESTful APIs and there won’t be any ZAPIs for them.
NMSDK provides .NET API Bindings for Windows, Java Bindings and Perl . Bindings are not available for Python, C and C++.
ONTAP REST API 9.6 python SDK is available. "The Python client library provides support for writing scripts in python to access the ONTAP REST API. Links to the Getting Started video and Python client library documentation are available on DevNet.NetApp. "
For users looking to automate ONTAP storage management , our request to these users is start using ONTAP RESTful APIs and associated SDK for automation use cases.