History of Python
Python is a widely used general-purpose, high-level programming language. It was initially designed by Guido van Rossum in 1991 and developed by Python Software Foundation. It was mainly developed for emphasis on code readability, and its syntax allows programmers to express concepts in fewer lines of code. Let’s dig deeper –
In the late 1980s, history was about to be written. It was that time when working on Python started. Soon after that, Guido Van Rossum began doing its application based work in December of 1989 by at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) which is situated in Netherlands. It was started firstly as a hobby project because he was looking for an interesting project to keep him occupied during Christmas. The programming language which Python is said to have succeeded is ABC Programming Language, which had the interfacing with the Amoeba Operating System and had the feature of exception handling. He had already helped to create ABC earlier in his career and he had seen some issues with ABC but liked most of the features. After that what he did as really very clever. He had taken the syntax of ABC, and some of its good features. It came with a lot of complaints too, so he fixed those issues completely and had created a good scripting language which had removed all the flaws. The inspiration for the name came from BBC’s TV Show – ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’, as he was a big fan of the TV show and also he wanted a short, unique and slightly mysterious name for his invention and hence he named it Python! He was the “Benevolent dictator for life” (BDFL) until he stepped down from the position as the leader on 12th July 2018. For quite some time he used to work for Google, but currently, he is working at Dropbox.
The language was finally released in 1991. When it was released, it used a lot fewer codes to express the concepts, when we compare it with Java, C++ & C. Its design philosophy was quite good too. Its main objective is to provide code readability and advanced developer productivity. When it was released it had more than enough capability to provide classes with inheritance, several core data types exception handling and functions.
Following are the illustrations of different versions of Python along with the timeline
Python 3.7.3 is the latest version.
The two of the most used versions has to Python 2.x & 3.x. There is a lot of competition between the two and both of them seem to have quite a number of different fanbase.
For various purposes such as developing, scripting, generation and software testing, this language is utilized. Due to its elegance and simplicity, top technology organizations like Dropbox, Google, Quora, Mozilla, Hewlett-Packard, Qualcomm, IBM, and Cisco have implemented Python.
Python has come a long way to become the most popular coding language in the world. Python has just turned 30, but it still has that unknown charm & X factor which can be clearly seen from the fact that Google users have consistently searched for Python much more than they have searched for Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump, Tom Cruise etc.
Python has been an inspiration for many other coding languages such as Ruby, Cobra, Boo, CoffeeScript ECMAScript, Groovy, Swift Go, OCaml, Julia etc.