Technology and Engineering Atlas

How Things Are Built
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme
Invention

Python (Programming Language)

Software Engineering

Python is a general-purpose programming language designed by the Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum, who began developing it in December 1989 at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica research institute in the Netherlands as a successor to the ABC language, and released it publicly in 1991. Van Rossum named the language after the British comedy troupe Monty Python's Flying Circus rather than the snake, and designed its syntax around significant indentation and a stated philosophy that code should be easy to read, favoring one obvious way to accomplish a task over many. Adopted first in scientific and system-administration scripting, Python's readability and large standard library later made it a leading language for web development, data science and machine learning, and it consistently ranks among the most widely used programming languages worldwide.

Facts
Patent or First-Use Date
1991-02-20 1
Year
1991 1
Significance
Widely taught as an introductory programming language. 1
FAQs

Why is the Python programming language called Python?

It is named after the comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Python is named after the British comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus, not after the snake. While he was beginning to implement the language, Guido van Rossum was also reading the published scripts from that BBC series of the 1970s. He wanted a name that was short, unique and slightly mysterious, so he chose Python.
Connections

In Field

Invented By

Source Wikipedia: Python (programming language)
In the Other Atlases

Invented

Also in Computing Atlas: which this subject invented.

Sources
1. Wikipedia: Python (programming language)
  • History, paragraph 1
    Van Rossum first released it in 1991 as Python 0.9.0.
  • Infobox, released
    1991 02 20
  • Lead section, paragraph 3
    Python is widely taught as an introductory programming language.
  • In Group: Programming Languages, lead sentence: a high-level, general-purpose programming language that emphasizes code readability, simplicity, and ease-of-writing
  • Invented By: Guido van Rossum, Introduction
    Python was conceived in the late 1980s by Guido van Rossum at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands.
View the Source
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.