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History of Python

Work on Python began in late 1989 by Guido van Rossum, then at CWI in the Netherlands, and eventually released for public distribution in early 1991. How did it all begin? Innovative languages are usually born from one of two motivations: a large well-funded research project or general frustration due to the lack of tools that were needed at the time to accomplish mundane and/or time-consuming tasks, many of which could be automated.

At the time, van Rossum was a researcher with considerable language design experience with the interpreted language ABC, also developed at CWI, but he was unsatisfied with its ability to be developed into something more. Some of the tools he envisioned were for performing general system administration tasks, so he also wanted access to the power of system calls that were available through the Amoeba distributed operating system. Although an Amoeba-specific language was given some thought, a generalized language made more sense, and late in 1989, the seeds of Python were sown.


Last updated on 9/14/2001
Core Python Programming, © 2002 Prentice Hall PTR

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© 2002, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.