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Earlier version of Wikipedia article is much more informative then the current one
Python was conceived in the late 1980s by Guido van Rossum at CWI in the Netherlands as a successor of the ABC programming language 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 acknowledged by referring to him as its Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL).
In 1991, van Rossum published the code (labeled version 0.9.0) to alt.sources. Already present at this stage in development were classes with inheritance, exception handling, functions, and the core datatypes of
list,dict,strand so on.Also in this initial release was a module system borrowed from Modula-3; van Rossum describes the module as "one of Python's major programming units".
Python's exception model also resembles Modula-3's, with the addition of an
elseclause.In 1994, comp.lang.python, the primary discussion forum for Python, was formed, marking a milestone in the growth of Python's userbase.
Python reached version 1.0 in January 1994. A major set of features included in this release were the functional programming tools
lambda,map,filterandreduce. Van Rossum states that "Python acquired lambda, reduce(), filter() and map(), courtesy of (I believe) a Lisp hacker who missed them and submitted working patches." The actual contributor was Amrit Prem; no specific mention of any Lisp heritage is mentioned in the release notes at the time.The last version released from CWI was Python 1.2. In 1995, van Rossum continued his work on Python at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) in Reston, Virginia where he released several versions of the software.
By version 1.4, Python had acquired several new features. Notable among these are the Modula-3 inspired keyword arguments (which are also similar to Common Lisp's keyword arguments), and built-in support for complex numbers. Also included is a basic form of data hiding by name mangling, though this is easily bypassed.
During van Rossum's stay at CNRI, he launched the Computer Programming for Everybody (CP4E) initiative, intending to make programming more accessible to more people, with a basic 'literacy' in programming languages, similar to the basic English literacy and mathematics skills required by most employers. Python served a central role in this: because of its focus on clean syntax, it was already suitable, and CP4E's goals bore similarities to its predecessor, ABC. The project was funded by DARPA. As of 2007, the CP4E project is inactive, and while Python attempts to be easily learnable and not too arcane in its syntax and semantics, reaching out to non-programmers is not an active concern.
In 2000, the Python core development team moved to BeOpen.com to form the BeOpen PythonLabs team. CNRI requested that a version 1.6 be released, summarising Python's development up to the point where the development team left CNRI. Consequently, the release schedules for 1.6 and 2.0 had a significant amount of overlap. Python 2.0 was the first and only release from BeOpen.com. After Python 2.0 was released by BeOpen.com, Guido van Rossum and the other PythonLabs developers joined Digital Creations.
Python 2.0 borrowed a major feature from the functional programming language Haskell: list comprehensions. Python's syntax for this construct is very similar to Haskell's, apart from Haskell's preference for punctuation characters and Python's preference for alphabetic keywords. Python 2.0 also introduced a garbage collection system capable of collecting reference cycles.
Following this double release, and after van Rossum left CNRI to work with commercial software developers, it became clear that the ability to use Python with software available under the GPL was very desirable. The license used at that time, the Python License, included a clause stating that the license was governed by the State of Virginia, which made it, in the view of the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) lawyers, incompatible with the GNU GPL. CNRI and the FSF interacted to develop enabling wording changes to Python's free software license that would make it GPL-compatible.
That year (2001), van Rossum was awarded the FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software.
Python 1.6.1 is essentially the same as Python 1.6, with a few minor bug fixes, and with the new GPL-compatible license.
Python 2.1 was a derivative work of Python 1.6.1, as well as of Python 2.0. Its license was renamed Python Software Foundation License. All code, documentation and specifications added, from the time of Python 2.1's alpha release on, is owned by the Python Software Foundation (PSF), a non-profit organisation formed in 2001, modelled after the Apache Software Foundation. Included in this release (though off by default and not mandatory until several versions later) was an implementation of scoping more similar to static scoping (of which Scheme is the originator) rules.
A major innovation in Python 2.2 was the unification of Python's types (types written in C), and classes (types written in Python) into one hierarchy. This single unification made Python's object model purely and consistently object oriented. Also added were generators which were inspired by Icon.
Python's standard library additions and syntactical choices were strongly influenced by Java in some cases: the
loggingpackage, introduced in version 2.3, the SAX parser, introduced in 2.0, and the decorator pattern syntax that uses@, added in version 2.4
Later version also adapted from Wikipedia
In February 1991, van Rossum published the code (labeled version 0.9.0) to alt.sources. This happened 3 years after initial release of Perl and before the first book on Perl was published. Larry Wall began work on Perl in 1987, while working as a programmer at Unisys, and released version 1.0 to the comp.sources.misc newsgroup on December 18, 1987. In 1991, Programming Perl, known to many Perl programmers as the "Camel Book" because of its cover, was published and became the de facto reference for the language.
Already present at this stage in development were
classes with inheritance, exception
handling, functions, and the core datatypes of list, dict, str and so on. Also in this initial
release was a module system borrowed from
Modula-3; Van Rossum describes the module as "one of Python's major
programming units".
Python's exception model also resembles Modula-3's, with the addition of an else clause.
In 1994 comp.lang.python, the primary discussion forum for Python, was formed, marking a milestone in the growth of Python's userbase.
Python reached version 1.0 in January 1994. Perl 5.000 was released on October 17, 1994.
The major new features included in this release were the functional programming tools
lambda,
map,
filter and
reduce. Van Rossum stated that "Python
acquired lambda, reduce(), filter() and map(), courtesy of a
Lisp hacker who missed them and submitted working
patches".
The last version released while Van Rossum was at CWI was Python 1.2. In 1995, Van Rossum continued his work on Python at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) in Reston, Virginia whence he released several versions.
By version 1.4, Python had acquired several new features. Notable among these are the Modula-3 inspired keyword arguments (which are also similar to Common Lisp's keyword arguments) and built-in support for complex numbers. Also included is a basic form of data hiding by name mangling, though this is easily bypassed.
During Van Rossum's stay at CNRI, he launched the Computer Programming for Everybody (CP4E) initiative, intending to make programming more accessible to more people, with a basic "literacy" in programming languages, similar to the basic English literacy and mathematics skills required by most employers. Python served a central role in this: because of its focus on clean syntax, it was already suitable, and CP4E's goals bore similarities to its predecessor, ABC. The project was funded by DARPA. As of 2007, the CP4E project is inactive, and while Python attempts to be easily learnable and not too arcane in its syntax and semantics, reaching out to non-programmers is not an active concern.
Perl 5.6 was released on March 22, 2000. In 2000, the Python core development team moved to BeOpen.com to form the BeOpen PythonLabs team. CNRI requested that a version 1.6 be released, summarizing Python's development up to the point at which the development team left CNRI. Consequently, the release schedules for 1.6 and 2.0 had a significant amount of overlap. Python 2.0 also introduced a garbage collection system capable of collecting reference cycles.
Python 2.0 was the only release from BeOpen.com. After Python 2.0 was released by BeOpen.com, Guido van Rossum and the other PythonLabs developers joined Digital Creations.
The Python 1.6 release included a new CNRI license that was substantially longer than the CWI license that had been used for earlier releases. The new license included a clause stating that the license was governed by the laws of the State of Virginia. The Free Software Foundation argued that the choice-of-law clause was incompatible with the GNU General Public License. BeOpen, CNRI and the FSF negotiated a change to Python's free software license that would make it GPL-compatible. Python 1.6.1 is essentially the same as Python 1.6, with a few minor bug fixes, and with the new GPL-compatible license.
Python 2.0 introduced list comprehensions, a feature borrowed from the functional programming languages SETL and Haskell. Python's syntax for this construct is very similar to Haskell's, apart from Haskell's preference for punctuation characters and Python's preference for alphabetic keywords.
Python 2.1 was close to Python 1.6.1, as well as Python 2.0. Its license was renamed Python Software Foundation License. All code, documentation and specifications added, from the time of Python 2.1's alpha release on, is owned by the Python Software Foundation (PSF), a non-profit organization formed in 2001, modeled after the Apache Software Foundation. The release included a change to the language specification to support nested scopes, like other statically scoped languages. (The feature was turned off by default, and not required, until Python 2.2.)
A major innovation in Python 2.2 was the unification of Python's types (types written in C) and classes (types written in Python) into one hierarchy. This single unification made Python's object model purely and consistently object oriented. Also added were generators which were inspired by Icon.
Python 2.6 was released to coincide with Python 3.0, and included some features from that release, as well as a "warnings" mode that highlighted the use of features that were removed in Python 3.0. Similarly, Python 2.7 coincided with and included features from Python 3.1, which was released on June 26, 2009. Parallel 2.x and 3.x releases then ceased, and Python 2.7 was the last release in the 2.x series.
In November 2014, it was announced that Python 2.7 would be supported until 2020, but users were encouraged to move to Python 3 as soon as possible.
Python 3.0 (also called "Python 3000" or "Py3K") was released on December 3, 2008. It was designed to rectify fundamental design flaws in the language—the changes required could not be implemented while retaining full backwards compatibility with the 2.x series, which necessitated a new major version number. The guiding principle of Python 3 was: "reduce feature duplication by removing old ways of doing things".
Python 3.0 was developed with the same philosophy as in prior versions. However, as Python had accumulated new and redundant ways to program the same task, Python 3.0 had an emphasis on removing duplicative constructs and modules, in keeping with "There should be one— and preferably only one —obvious way to do it".
Nonetheless, Python 3.0 remained a multi-paradigm language. Coders still had options among object-orientation, structured programming, functional programming and other paradigms, but within such broad choices, the details were intended to be more obvious in Python 3.0 than they were in Python 2.x.
Python 3.0 broke backward compatibility, and much Python 2 code does not run unmodified on Python 3. Python's dynamic typing combined with the plans to change the semantics of certain methods of dictionaries, for example, made perfect mechanical translation from Python 2.x to Python 3.0 very difficult.
A tool called "2to3" does the parts of translation that can be done automatically. At this, 2to3 appeared to be fairly successful, though an early review noted that there were aspects of translation that such a tool would never be able to handle. Prior to the roll-out of Python 3, projects requiring compatibility with both the 2.x and 3.x series were recommended to have one source (for the 2.x series), and produce releases for the Python 3.x platform using 2to3. Edits to the Python 3.x code were discouraged for so long as the code needed to run on Python 2.x. This is no longer recommended; as of 2012 the preferred alternative is to create a single code base that can run under both Python 2 and 3 using compatibility modules.
Some of the major changes included for Python 3.0 were:
print so that it is a built-in function, not a statement. This made it easier to change a module to use
a different print function, as well as making the syntax more regular. In Python 2.6 and 2.7 print() is available as
a builtin but is masked by the print statement syntax, which can be disabled by entering from __future__ import print_function
at the top of the file.input function, and the renaming of the raw_input function to input.
Python 3's input function behaves like Python 2's raw_input function, in that the input is always returned
as a string rather than being evaluated as an expression.reduce (but not map or filter) out of the built-in namespace and into functools
(the rationale being that operations using reduce are expressed more clearly using an accumulation loop);str/unicode types, representing text, and introducing a separate immutable bytes
type; and a mostly corresponding mutable bytearray type, both of which represent arrays of
bytes;5 / 2 is 2. In Python 3, 5 / 2 is 2.5, and 5 // 2 is
2).Subsequent releases in the Python 3.x series have included additional, substantial new features; all ongoing development of the language is done in the 3.x series.
Release dates for the major and minor versions:
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Linux Today
As open source projects go, Python, the "very high level language" developed by Guido Van Rossum 10 years ago, is a prime example of the "scratch your own itch" design philosophy.
Van Rossum, a 44 year old developer who spent much of his collegiate and post- collegiate years working with instructional software languages such as ABC and Pascal, freely admits that it was his annoyance with these languages' real-word performance that drove him to create Python.
"The history of Python came out of the frustration I had with ABC when it wasn't being used for teaching, but for day-to-day ad hoc programming," says Van Rossum, who in 1999 received an "Excellence in Programming" award from the Dr. Dobb's Journal for his Python work.
Nearly a decade after releasing the first version of Python, Van Rossum is currently looking at how to bridge the gap between languages that are easy for non-technical users to grasp and languages that are capable of performing industrial-strength computational tasks. Recently, he and other Python developers have joined together to form Computer Programming for Everybody, or CP4E, a project that is currently seeking funds from DARPA, the modern day descendant of the organization that helped build the early Internet.
According to Van Rossum, CP4E will explore the way non-technical users engage in computing, in a way that will gain new insights into smoothing the human/machine interaction.
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funkwaterDevil's AvocadoI smell evil... (Score:3) ( 20267 ) writes: on Tuesday May 30, 2000 @10:04AM (#1037487)
Guido and his team will now be devoting their full energies to Python development and continuing with such innovative projects as Python 3000
Looks like a Microsoft press statement to me. Keep your eye on these Python folks.
Re:Woohoo (Score:3) by ( 73913 ) writes: on Tuesday May 30, 2000 @10:28AM (#1037504)
Call me a newbie/dork/lamer/whatever, but the sound of a programming language named after a potentially deadly snake is appealing to me.
Actually, Guido named Python after Monty Python's Flying Circus, which is infinitely cooler than naming it after a snake. You would know that if you weren't such a newbie/dork/lamer. (Just kidding!) Seriously, though, check out the language -- it rocks balls. It's like Perl without all that !@#$!@% shit.
Stupid question time: anybody know what Python 3000 is?
Python 3000 is the next major version of Python (although at least one more minor version is going to be released). It will be backwards incompatible and clear up many of the outstanding warts in Python's design. At this point it's not much more than a twinkle in Guido's eye.
-DA
Re:Whitespace-sensitive (Score:5) ( 10202 ) writes: on Tuesday May 30, 2000 @10:47AM (#1037514) Homepage Journal
Python is whitespace-sensitive, but I think it's a misconception that this will cramp your style unnecessarily. As long as you remain consistent, Python doesn't care if your blocks are indented 1 space or 10. There's still a lot of leeway for individuality.
As for the usefulness, a semi-consistent style makes reading other peoples' code easier and it means less characters onscreen (such as { and }) for marking the starts and stops of blocks - leaving more room for code.
It's not for everyone, I'll admit, but it didn't take me long before I'd forgotten about the indentation rules entirely. Now I don't even think about them unless someone reminds me.
Re:Whitespace-sensitive (Score:2) by ( 17646 ) writes: on Tuesday May 30, 2000 @11:12AM (#1037526)
IMO, Python's white-space sensitivity is a good idea because it takes "you" and "me" out of the equation.
It's great that "you" have your own "consistent, easy to follow" code format - which is easy to follow for, well, YOU. But what if that format isn't easy to follow for "me" or "the next guy"? (see: much existing C and Perl code for examples)
By taking code formatting, braces, and other religious formatting arguments out of the loop, Python code is pretty much readable by any Python programmer.
Imagine if programming languages required writing and saving the code in Word/WordPerfect or some other proprietary format; you could say that "your" file format was best, but I couldn't necessarily read it. Fortunately, code is normally saved as ASCII text so I can read it in emacs or vi and not care how you wrote it. I look at Python's "format enforced/religiously neutral" system as providing similar benefits.
paul
focus on simplicity (Score:5) by ( 13128 ) writes: on Tuesday May 30, 2000 @01:58PM (#1037562)
What makes Python a great language is its simplicity, both at the level of implementation and at the level of the language.
What I hope to see for Python 3000 is mostly cleanups that weren't possible in earlier versions because of backwards incompatibility: a simpler, leaner implementation with a "nicer" interface to C++ code, lexical scoping rules, and a simple full garbage collector in place of reference counting. Moving the NumPy numerical array type into the core would also help with creating numerical extensions. But that's largely all I would like to see in the next major release of Python.
I'm not sure that the transition to BeOpen.com of the development effort is altogether a good thing. If this results in extra resources and they are focussed on enhancing Python, Python may become too complex and featureful; a number of other languages that started out like Python have gone down that road and become marginalized. Or Python may simply end up being a side-line for some other business, just like what seems to have happened with Scriptics and Tcl.
Python is Guido's baby, and it's his to decide where to take it. But I hope he'll keep these kinds of concerns in mind.
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LinuxMall.com
Python's fearless leader and self-proclaimed "Benevolent Dictator for Life" (BDFL), Guido van Rossum, recently wrote an open letter to the community, proclaiming Python's decision to move the project to new auspices in the Open Source realm.
"Python is growing rapidly. In order to take it to the next level, I've moved with my core development group to a new employer, BeOpen.com," van Rossum wrote. "BeOpen.com is a startup company with a focus on Open Source communities, and an interest in facilitating next-generation application development. It is a natural fit for Python."
BeOpen.com develops online communities for Open Source application users, developers and interested parties through its network of portal Web sites. It also offers support and custom development for Open Source applications specific to major corporations and governmental entities.
Van Rossum created Python in the early 1990s at CWI (the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands) in Amsterdam. In 1995, he moved to the United States, and lives in Reston, Virginia.
In the past five years, van Rossum has worked as a researcher at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). He also is technical director of the Python Consortium, a CNRI-hosted international consortium that promotes Python use and development.
Van Rossum has headed up Python's development for the past decade. He said he expects to remain in the position for at least another 10 years and although he "is not worried about getting hit by a bus," he also has announced that he soon will be married and the union between Python and BeOpen.com will give him some time for a honeymoon.
At BeOpen.com, van Rossum is the director of a new development team recently dubbed PythonLabs. The team includes three of his colleagues from CNRI: Fred Drake, Jeremy Hylton, and Barry Warsaw. "Another familiar face will join us shortly: Tim Peters. We have our own Web site where you can read more about us, our plans and our activities. We've also posted a FAQ there specifically about PythonLabs, our transition to BeOpen.com, and what it means for the Python community," he said.
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