History of Python

Python was developed by Guido Van Rossum in 1991. In the early 1980s He worked at CWI. Here he worked on the programming language which was called ABC. Later in the decade he was working on an Operating System where he needed a scripting language to be able to access the new operating system calls. The ABC language had limitations so he decided to develop a new scripting language to overcome this. He began working on this throughout the end of the 1980s before releasing it in 1991. In July of 2018 Van Rossum stepped down as the leader of the community of the languge after being the leader for 30 years

Python was named after the comedy TV show called Monty Python’s Fly Circus which Van Rossum liked at the time. This lead him to when he started the project he called it ‘Python’

The first version that was avaliable was version 0.9.0, The first features of the language to be included were exception handling, function declaring and calling. The first version included the datatypes – list, dict, string, and int. As well as this it had modules and could import modules and classes therefore was object-oriented. This module system was borrowed from the language Modula-3

Picture of Guido Van Rossum

Year	Development
January 1994	Python version 1.0 was released in January 1994 which then brought new features which were for functional programming, these included lambda, map, filter and reduce. Although Van Rossum never liked or used any of these features
October 2000	Python version 2.0 was released. Python 2 introduced new features, these included Unicode support, better memory management, and also moved to a more community supported process
December 2008	Python version 3.0 was released. Python 3 brought several changes including – made print a function, more simplified rules for ordering, made only one type of integer to avoid confusion, introduced “//” to calculate integer division. This release was also not backwards - compatible so python 2 code would be different from python 3 code.