- It's time for a quick pop quiz.
Was Python named after A, a snake,
B, the British comedy troupe Monty Python,
or C, a famous computer scientist.
Believe it or not, the answer is B.
Python was written in the late 1980s by Guido van Rossum
with its first release occurring in 1991.
Guido had spent a number of years working
on a language called ABC,
and calls ABC the first and foremost influence on Python.
According to van Rossum,
he picked the name because it was the first thing
that came to mind and was quote, "suitably irreverent."
Van Rossum for many years tried to distance
the language from snake references,
but finally gave in when the publishing company O'Reilly,
famous for having animals on the cover of their books,
wanted to put a snake on the cover
of their first Python book.
In Guido's words, quote, "If it had to be an animal,
"it might as well be a snake."
Guido was Python's lead developer
and benevolent dictator for life for almost 30 years
before stepping down from the position in 2018.
Python has only had three major releases.
Python 1 was released in 1994 and added, among other things,
functional programming tools to the initial release.
Python 2 was released in October 2000
and introduced list comprehensions,
which are still one of Python's most popular features.
Python 3, also known as Python 3000 or Py3K,
was released in 2008
and updated certain design flaws in the language.
Python 3 was not backwards compatible,
meaning upgrading a code base from Python 2
to Python 3 could not be completely automated.
As such, Python 2 continued to be supported
for several years.
It was originally scheduled for end of life in 2015,
but was pushed back to 2020
due to the large number of code bases
that still had not been upgraded to Python 3.
Python 2 was officially sunset in January, 2020
over a decade after its original release.
And it will no longer receive security updates
or active support.
Because of the upgrade debacle from Python 2 to 3,
Guido has said that no one on the core team
is particularly thrilled about the idea of Python 4,
and are much more likely
to just keep releasing incremental changes to Python 3.
Python is known for its design philosophy,
which was codified in "The Zen of Python"
written by Tim Peters
and includes some truly inspirational nuggets,
including quote, "Beautiful is better than ugly,"
"Simple is better than complex,"
"Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules,"
and "In the face of ambiguity,
"refuse the temptation to guess."
You can read the entire "Zen of Python"
by going into a Python shell and typing import this.
Ultimately, part of Python's success stems
from Guido van Rossum's belief that quote,
"Programming languages are how programmers
"express and communicate ideas, and the audience
"for those ideas is other programmers, not computers."
As such, it is not surprising that 30 years later
Python remains one of the most popular ways
for programmers to communicate with each other.