[6] Van Rossum was born and raised in the Netherlands, where he received a master's degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Amsterdam in 1982.

[10][11][12] While working at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Van Rossum wrote and contributed a glob() routine to BSD Unix in 1986[13][14] and helped develop the ABC programming language.

In May 2000, he left CNRI along with three other Python core developers to work for tech startup BeOpen.com, which subsequently collapsed by October of the same year.

[28][29][30] In December 1989, Van Rossum had been looking for a "'hobby' programming project that would keep [him] occupied during the week around Christmas" as his office was closed when he decided to write an interpreter for a "new scripting language [he] had been thinking about lately: a descendant of ABC that would appeal to Unix/C hackers".

[32] On 12 July 2018, Van Rossum announced that he would be stepping down from the position of benevolent dictator for life of the Python programming language.

[33] In 1999, Van Rossum submitted a funding proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) called "Computer Programming for Everybody", in which he further defined his goals for Python: In 2019, Python became the second most popular language on GitHub, the largest source code management website on the internet, after JavaScript.