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The Birth of Python

The story of Python begins in the late 1980s, a pivotal era in the history of programming languages. It was during this time that a young programmer named Guido van Rossum set out to create a language that would overcome the limitations he saw in other programming languages.

History​

  • Creation by Guido van Rossum: Python was conceived in the late 1980s by Guido van Rossum at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands as a successor to the ABC programming language. The project began over the Christmas holiday of 1989 as a hobby project to keep van Rossum occupied during the week.
  • Influence of Other Languages: Python was influenced by several languages, including ABC, Modula-3, and C. Van Rossum aimed to rectify what he perceived as flaws in the UNIX/C programming environment, wanting a language that was powerful yet easy to read and open to users who were not professional software developers.
  • First Release: The first version of Python, Python 0.9.0, was released in February 1991. This release included features like classes with inheritance, exception handling, functions, and the core datatypes of list, dict, str, etc.

Initial Goals and Design Philosophy​

  • Readability and Simplicity: From the onset, van Rossum designed Python with the intention of making it highly readable. He wanted a language where developers could express concepts in fewer lines of code than possible in languages like C. The emphasis was on simplicity and minimalism, to facilitate learning and understanding.
  • Developer Productivity: Python was created with the goal of increasing developer productivity, providing a high-level syntax easy to understand for beginners. The idea was to reduce the time required to develop complex programs and thus speed up the programming process.
  • The Zen of Python: Python's design philosophy is encapsulated in "The Zen of Python", a collection of 19 aphorisms for writing computer programs in Python. Some of these principles include "Beautiful is better than ugly," "Simple is better than complex," "Readability counts," and "If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea." These principles guide the development of Python to this day, emphasizing clarity and readability.

The birth of Python marked a significant shift in the world of programming. It was a language not just for writing quick scripts or for academic and research purposes, but for full-scale development. It appealed to a wide range of programmers, from beginners to experts, due to its emphasis on readability and efficiency. This philosophy has not only guided Python's development over the years but also fostered a vibrant, supportive community around it. The result is a language that continues to evolve and adapt, always staying true to its core principles of simplicity and readability.