The Life of Python
Python was invented around 1990 by Guido van Rossum, when he was at CWI in Amsterdam. It is named after the BBC comedy series Monty Python ’s Flying Circus, of which Guido is a fan (see this chapter’s sidebar "What’s in a Name?“). Guido was also involved with the Amoeba distributed operating system and the ABC language. In fact, his original motivation for creating Python was to create an advanced scripting language for the Amoeba system. Moreover, Python borrowed many of the usability-study-inspired ideas in ABC, but added practicality in the form of libraries, datatypes, external interfaces, and more.
The net effect was that Python’s design turned out to be general enough to address a wide variety of domains. It is now used in increasingly diverse roles by hundreds of thousands of engineers around the world. Companies use Python today in commercial products for tasks as diverse as web site construction, hardware testing, numeric analysis, customizing C++ and Java class libraries, movie animation, and much more (more on roles in the next section). In fact, because Python is a completely general-purpose language, its target domains are limited only by the scope of computers in general.
Since it first appeared on the public domain scene in 1991, Python has continued to attract a loyal following and has spawned a dedicated Internet newsgroup, comp.lang.python, in 1994. As the first edition of this book was being written in 1995, Python’s home page debuted on the ...