History of python

 History of python

                                       Python was designed by Guido van Rossum while he was working at the CWI (the Centrum voor Wiskunke and Informatica; literally “center for wisdom and informatics”) a world-class research lab in the Netherlands. The CWI group he was associated with designed a programming language called ABC.  ABC was clearly intended as a pedagogical tool for teaching programming, and a great deal of work went into developing both the language and associated teaching material.1 The language ABC had a number of features that were impressive for the time: a tightly integrated development environment, interactive execution, high level data types (lists, dictionaries, tuples and strings), dynamic memory management, strong typing without declaration statements and more. 

                      The idea to use indentation for nesting, and eliminate the brackets or BEGIN/END keywords found in most other languages, was taken directly from ABC. So was the idea of dynamic typing. Software development in ABC was both rapid and enjoyable, and totally unlike almost any other competing language. (The one exception might be Smalltalk, which was just becoming well known in 1985. Indeed, during my time at the CWI I was writing a book on Smalltalk, and part of the work I performed during that year was to explain to my colleagues in the ABC group the basic ideas of Object-Oriented programming, which I myself was only just beginning to understand)

                     

                      Guido started designing Python around 1990. For those familiar with the earlier language the heritage of ABC in Python is clear. Guido discarded some of the annoying features of ABC, and kept all the best ideas, recasting them in the form of a more general-purpose language. By then the mechanisms of object-oriented programming were well understood, and the language included all the latest features. He added a number of features not found in ABC, such as a system for modularization and including libraries of useful utilities. Python was released to the world in 1991, and very quickly attracted a loyal following. 

                        Python’s design turned out to be general enough to address a much wider range of applications than ABC. (To be fair, the designers of ABC were focused on teaching, and never intended the language to be general-purpose). The features that programmers appreciated in 1990 are still the same today: ease of use, rapid software development, the right set of data types that help to quickly address most common programming problems.

Python Monty:

The name, by the way, owes nothing to the reptile and everything to the 1970’s BBC  comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Many die-hard Python programmers enjoy  making sly references to this series in their examples. You don’t need to have seen Monty  Python’s Life of Brian, The Meaning of Life, And Now for something Completely  Different, or Monty Python and the Holy Grail or even Spamalot in order to become a  Python programmer, but it can’t hurt, either.