Python was originally developed by Guido van Rossum as a productivity-boosting alternative to traditional programming languages. Development began in December 1989, and the first full release of Python (1.0) was made in 1994. The language grew rapidly in popularity and user base. The 2.0 release of Python arrived in 2000, and it is still the base for many of the Python programs currently available. The 2.0 release and subsequent 2.x releases added significant new functionality to the original language. By the mid-2000’s, the language had become fairly complex, so work began on the 3.0 release. The focus of 3.0 was to remove redundant ways of doing the same thing; however, this broke backwards compatibility with 2.x series code (although some functionality has been backported to Python 2.7 and many codes run in both 2.7.x and 3.x).

The 3.0 version of the language was released in 2008. Currently there are both 3.x and 2.x versions of the language floating around, although version 2.7.x is past end-of-life. This topic assumes Python 3.6 as its working version, although we will point out differences between 2.x and 3.x as needed.

In addition, see the Wikipedia entry History of Python for more detail on the evolution of the language. Incidentally, Python is named after the BBC show “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and has nothing to do with reptiles.