History
Python was conceived in the late 1980s and its implementation was started in December 1989 by Guido van Rossum at CWI in the Netherlands as a successor to the ABC language (itself inspired by SETL) capable of exception handling and interfacing with the Amoeba operating system. Van Rossum is Python's principal author, and his continuing central role in deciding the direction of Python is reflected in the title given to him by the Python community, Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL).
Python 2.0 was released on 16 October 2000, with many major new features including a full garbage collector and support for Unicode. However, the most important change was to the development process itself, with a shift to a more transparent and community-backed process.
Python 3.0 (also called Python 3000 or py3k), a major, backwards-incompatible release, was released on 3 December 2008 after a long period of testing. Many of its major features have been backported to the backwards-compatible Python 2.6 and 2.7.
Python has been awarded a TIOBE Programming Language of the Year award twice (2007, 2010), which is given to the language with the greatest growth in popularity over the course of a year, as measured by the TIOBE index.
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)