Python History
Python is linked to ABC Programming language. ABC is a general-purpose programming language and programming environment, which had been developed in the Netherlands, Amsterdam, at the CWI (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica). The greatest achievement of ABC was to influence the design of Python. Python was conceptualized in the late 1980s. Guido van Rossum worked that time in a project at the CWI, called Amoeba, a distributed operating system. Guido van Rossum faced challenges while working with ABC, thats when he decided to design a simple scripting language that possessed some of ABC's better properties, but without its problems. So he started typing. He created a simple virtual machine, a simple parser, and a simple runtime. He made his own version of the various ABC parts that he liked. He created a basic syntax, used indentation for statement grouping instead of curly braces or begin-end blocks, and developed a small number of powerful data types: a hash table (or dictionary, as we call it), a list, strings, and numbers. And a new programming language Python was born.
Van Rossum is Python's principal author, and his continuing central role in deciding the direction of Python is reflected in the title given to him by the Python community, Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL) Python was named for the BBC TV show Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Python 2.0 was released on October 16, 2000, with many major new features, including a cycle-detecting garbage collector (in addition to reference counting) for memory management and support for Unicode. However, the most important change was to the development process itself, with a shift to a more transparent and community-backed process.
Python 3.0, a major, backwards-incompatible release, was released on December 3, 2008 after a long period of testing. Many of its major features have also been backported to the backwards-compatible Python 2.6 and 2.7.
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. Now Python 2 development and support has been stopped. But a user can have any number of Python versions installed including Python 2.x and/or Python 3.x. One has to point to the right path of Python interpreter while using it.
Note: In this tutorial, we will use Python 3