Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Python's name is derived from the BBC show “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”, whom Python creator Guido van Rossum enjoyed while developing the language. Monty Python references appear frequently in Python code and culture, as per documentation, making references to Monty Python skits in documentation is not only allowed, it is encouraged !
Python was conceived in the late 1980s by Guido van Rossum at the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands, or Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI) as it is known in Dutch as a successor to the ABC programming language,
ABC's authors started designing the language in the late 70s and early 80s. Guido van Rossum joined the team in 1983. They worked until 1986 or 1987. For various reasons, the ABC project wasn't a big success. As per Guido van Rossum, it was too early, before there was an Internet to do efficient dist ribution.
ABC's design had a very clear, sharp focus. ABC was intended to be a programming language that could be taught to intelligent computer users who were not computer programmers or software developers in any sense. These students were surprised at certain limitations, restrictions, and arbitrary rules that programming languages had traditionally set out. Based on this user feedback, ABC's designers tried to develop a different language.
Guido van Rossum moved to a different project at CWI, the Amoeba project. Amoeba was a distributed operating system. By the late 1980s team needed a scripting language. Guido van Rossum had a large degree of freedom on that project to start his own mini project within the scope of what he was doing. He used all his experience and some of his frustration with ABC and decided to try to design a simple scripting language that possessed some of ABC's better properties, but without its problems.
As per Guido van Rossum, his most innovative contribution to Python's success was making it easy to extend. That also came out of his frustration with ABC. ABC was a very monolithic design. There was a language design team, and they were God. They designed every language detail and there was no way to add to it. You could write your own programs, but you couldn't easily add lo w-level stuff.
Van Rossum shouldered sole responsibility for the project, as the lead developer, until 12 July 2018, when he announced his "permanent vacation" from his responsibilities as Python's "benevolent dictator for life", a title the Python community bestowed upon him to reflect his long-term commitment as the project's ch i** ef decision-maker
Major Python Versions:
Python 0.9.0 (February 1991): Python's first public version, Python 0.9.0, was released. This marked the beginning of Python's availability to a wider audience.
Python 1.0 (January 26, 1994):** Python 1.0 was the first official release. It included features such as exception handling, modules, and the core data structures w**e now associate with Python.
Python 2.0 (October 16, 2000): Python 2.0 introduced list comprehensions, garbage collection, and Unicode support, among other enhancements. Python 2 became the predominant version for many yea**rs.
Python 3.0 (December 3, 2008): Python 3.0, also known as Python 3000 or simply Python 3, was a significant and somewhat controversial update. It introduced many changes to the language, aiming to improve consistency and address some long-standing issues. Python 3 was not backward-compatible with Python 2, leading to a gradual transition perio d as the Python community migrated to Python 3.
As of today, Python is most populat programming lnaguges in the world, in the world of AI, this has become a sort of de facto language.
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post by Pravin