April 2015
Intermediate to advanced
25 pages
49m
English
Content preview from Python in Education
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Chapter 1. The Story of Python
In December 1989, a Dutch programmer called Guido van Rossum was looking for a “hobby” project to keep him occupied over his Christmas holiday. He decided to write an interpreter for a new programming language he’d been thinking about. He states that he was in a slightly irreverent mood so he decided to call his project “Python” after the famous British comedy troupe, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”1
Van Rossum goes on to explain:
It all started with ABC, a wonderful teaching language that I had helped create in the early eighties. It was an incredibly elegant and powerful language, aimed at non-professional programmers. Despite all its elegance and power and the availability of a free implementation, ABC never became popular in the Unix/C world. I can only speculate about the reasons, but here’s a likely one: the difficulty of adding new “primitive” operations to ABC. It was a monolithic, “closed system,” with only the most basic I/O operations: read a string from the console, write a string to the console. I decided not to repeat this mistake in Python.
Perhaps this explains why Python is so popular in education: from the beginning, it was derived from a language designed for teaching and aimed at nonprofessional programmers. Yet by making it an open and extensible platform (Python is an open source project), Python could grow into the hugely popular and flexible language it is today, capable of simply and effectively addressing many different ...
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