Web Standards Programmer's Reference: HTML, CSS, JavaScript®, Perl, Python®, and PHP

26.1. The History of Python

Python was invented by Guido van Rossum; development began in the late 1980s. Van Rossum began work on Python in the Netherlands at the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science or Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), as it is known in Dutch. He got assigned to a project called the Amoeba Project, which needed a scripting language that he was assigned to develop. That scripting language was the beginning of Python, which van Rossum originally intended to be a second language for C and C++ developers to use when a powerful shell-scripting language was needed to script something written for a single, particular use. Since then, Python, now owned by the Python Software Foundation, has developed a reputation for clean syntax and productivity. Guido van Rossum describes Python as sharing some characteristics with scripting languages, but also sharing some characteristics with more traditional programming languages.