History of the emergence and development of Python
Python celebrated its 33rd anniversary in 2024. During this time, it has grown from a pet project into one of the most popular programming languages in the world, but not many people know about the history of this language. In this article we will discuss this topic.
Guido van Rossum
The main creator is the Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum. He was born on January 31, 1956 in The Hague, Netherlands.
He initially worked on the development of the ABC language. The ABC language was developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s at the University of Amsterdam's Centre for Mathematics in collaboration with the French research institute INRIA. ABC was designed to teach programming and was characterized by its simplicity and accessibility, but did not solve complex problems. As a result, ABC did not gain much popularity in industrial development, but it became a prerequisite for the development of something bigger.
In December 1989, Guido began creating a language that would combine the simplicity of ABC with more powerful features. This is how Python was born.
In 1994, an article was published “What if Guido had been hit by a bus?The bus here is referred to bus factor. In the article, the author shared his opinion that large companies are afraid to use technologies that are tied to one person. The main topic was the dependence of the Python community on the decisions of Guido van Rossum.
The author of the paper, Michael Maclay, was a researcher at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The paper raised a serious problem: Guido was essentially single-handedly determining how the language would evolve: he carefully studied the feedback and then personally selected the changes that would go into the next release.
Michael offered Guido a partnership and that's how it came about in 1995. Python Software Foundation — a nonprofit organization that still protects and develops Python. It has had several leaders, with Guido being named benevolent dictator for life (Benevolent Dictator For Life).
In 2018, he announced his retirement from this position to give the community more decision-making power.
A little about the logo and name
The name for the ABC language was thought over for a long time and they wanted to emphasize its main feature – ease of learning. The team seemed to show that programming is like the alphabet: first you learn “A”, then “B”, “C” and so on.
However, Guido didn't want to spend too much time on the name and dedicated it to his favorite British comedy show – Monty Python's Flying Circus (Monty Python's Flying Circus).
Users on the Internet began publishing articles and books about Python. Snakes began to appear on the covers more and more often, and the team began to think about developing a logo! Guido did not look for a complex solution, he simply played with fonts and wrote the word “python”. This was until 2006, when Guido's brother – Justa van Rossuma type designer and programmer, did not propose the logo we know:
History of development
In February 1991, Guido van Rossum published Python code, labeled version 0.9.0, on alt.sources. At this stage, it already included classes with inheritance, exception handling, functions, and basic data types: list, dict, str etc. Also in this initial release were modules. Van Rossum described the module as “one of the most important elements in Python programming.”
In 1994, with the growing number of users, the comp.lang.python group was formed – the main Python forum. In the same year, elements of functional programming and OOP were added. Python was originally written in the C programming language, which served for its fairly fast execution.
Python 2.0 was released on October 16, 2000, and included many major new features, such as full garbage collection and Unicode support. However, the most important change of all was the change in the language development process itself, moving to a more transparent process for its creation. This version played a major role in popularizing Python, as it was welcomed and adopted by many developers.
The first backwards-incompatible version of Python, 3.0, was released on December 3, 2008, after a long testing period. The main problem with version 2.0 and later was that there were many ways to do the same things, which contradicted the principle: “There should be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do it.”
However, Python remained a “multi-paradigm” language. The programmer could still choose between object-oriented, structured, functional programming, and other paradigms. But with such a wide choice, the features of each approach should be more obvious in Python 3.0 than in Python 2.x.
Note: The table only reflects major Python versions and their key changes. In reality, there are many more versions with minor changes and improvements.
Finally, I would like to say that today Python is an example of how open and collaborative development can lead to the creation of a powerful and versatile tool that continues to inspire and support millions of developers around the world.
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