Python(History & Facts)#2

Python is a widely used high-level programming language for general-purpose programming, created by Guido van Rossum in the late eighties and early nineties at the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands.

Python was conceptualized in the late 1980s. implementation began in December 1989[29] by Guido van Rossum at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) as a successor to the ABC language with an Operation System Amoeba (A distributed operating system). In an interview with Bill Venners (January 2003), Guido van Rossum said: “I remembered all my experience and some of my frustration with ABC. I decided to try to design a simple scripting language that possessed some of ABC’s better properties, but without its problems. So I started typing. I created a simple virtual machine, a simple parser, and a simple runtime. I made my own version of the various ABC parts that I liked. I created a basic syntax, used indentation for statement grouping instead of curly braces or begin-end blocks, and developed a small number of powerful data types: a hash table ( or dictionary, as we call it), a list, strings, and numbers. “

Python is now maintained by a core development team at the institute, although Guido van Rossum still holds a vital role in directing its progress.

Python 2.0 was released on 16 October 2000 with many new features including cycle-detecting garbage collector and support for Unicodes

Python 3.0 released on 3 December 2008, this was a major, backward-incompatible release.