History of Python

Python was created by Guido van Rossum in the late 1980s as a successor to the ABC language. Van Rossum worked at the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands, and he wanted to create a language that was easy to use, yet powerful. Van Rossum started work on Python in December 1989 and released the first version of Python (version 0.9.0) in February 1991. The language was named after the British comedy group Monty Python, as Van Rossum was a fan of their work. The early versions of Python were designed to be easy to learn and use, and were influenced by other programming languages such as ABC, Modula-3, and C. In 1994, Python 1.0 was released with several new features, including lambda, map, filter, and reduce functions, as well as support for functional programming. In 2000, Python 2.0 was released with many new features, including support for garbage collection, Unicode, and list comprehensions. Python 2.0 also introduced a new development cycle, with the creation of the Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) process for proposing and discussing new features. Python 3.0 was released in 2008, with several major changes to the language, including a new print function, changes to the division operator, and improved Unicode support. However, Python 3.0 was not backward-compatible with earlier versions of Python, which caused some controversy and slowed adoption of the new version. Despite this, Python continued to grow in popularity and is now widely used in a variety of applications, from web development and scientific computing to artificial intelligence and machine learning. Today, Python is maintained by the Python Software Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and advancing the Python programming language.