Thirty years ago at Christmas, the Python prologue was written

During Christmas 1989, Guido van Rossum, who had already earned a master’s degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Amsterdam, decided to beat the Christmas boredom by developing a new language interpreter as a successor to ABC. This language is one of the most popular today — Python.

Python was chosen as the name of the programming language after Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a British television comedy that first aired in the 1970s.

In 1991, the first Python interpreter was released. It is implemented in C language and can call the C library (.so file). And it already had Python’s core data types: classes, functions, lists, dict, and modules.

Python design philosophy is “elegant”, “clear”, “simple”, Guido takes “Life is short, I use Python” as Python’s Slogan.

This is because Python hides a lot of machine-level detail from the compiler and highlights the logic of programming. This allows Python programmers to spend more time thinking about program logic than implementation details.

That’s why, after years in the wilderness, Python is finally taking advantage of the rise of big data and artificial intelligence to make it easy for data /AI developers without the need to focus on programming engineering.

Python is now one of the most popular languages in the world, with 27% of respondents starting or continuing to learn Python in the past year, according to Jetbrains.

More and more data developers are using Python instead of MATLAB as the data processing language, and machine learning developers are using Python almost as their preferred language. Flask and Django, two excellent Web frameworks that inherit Python’s design philosophy, have given Python a place in the Web.

Google hired Guido and used Python as its third development language. YouTube and Instagram used Python as their main technology stack. Domestic Douban is also a big user of Python.

I wonder if Guido would have imagined that Christmas 30 years ago that he would have written a vacation vacation that would become a dominant programming language 30 years later.

Merry Christmas everyone!

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