History of Python
The programming language Python was conceived in the late 1980s,[1] and its implementation was started in December 1989[2] by Guido van Rossum at CWI in the Netherlands as a successor to ABC capable of exception handling and interfacing with the Amoeba operating system.
[7] Python 2.0 was released on October 16, 2000, with many major new features, such as list comprehensions, cycle-detecting garbage collector (in addition to reference counting) and reference counting, for memory management and support for Unicode, along with a change to the development process itself, with a shift to a more transparent and community-backed process.
[12][13] Already present at this stage in development were classes with inheritance, exception handling, functions, and the core datatypes of list, dict, str and so on.
The major new features included in this release were the functional programming tools lambda, map, filter and reduce.
Van Rossum stated that "Python acquired lambda, reduce(), filter() and map(), courtesy of a Lisp hacker who missed them and submitted working patches".
In 1995, Van Rossum continued his work on Python at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) in Reston, Virginia from where he released several versions.
Python served a central role in this: because of its focus on clean syntax, it was already suitable, and CP4E's goals bore similarities to its predecessor, ABC.
[16] As of 2007[update], the CP4E project is inactive, and while Python attempts to be easily learnable and not too arcane in its syntax and semantics, outreach to non-programmers is not an active concern.
After Python 2.0 was released by BeOpen.com, Guido van Rossum and the other PythonLabs developers joined Digital Creations.
The Free Software Foundation argued that the choice-of-law clause was incompatible with the GNU General Public License.
[21] Python 2.0, released October 2000,[8] introduced list comprehensions, a feature borrowed from the functional programming languages SETL and Haskell.
[25] Python 2.5 was released in September 2006[26] and introduced the with statement, which encloses a code block within a context manager (for example, acquiring a lock before the block of code is run and releasing the lock afterwards, or opening a file and then closing it), allowing resource acquisition is initialization (RAII)-like behavior and replacing a common try/finally idiom.
At this, 2to3 appeared to be fairly successful, though an early review noted that there were aspects of translation that such a tool would never be able to handle.
[10] This is no longer recommended; as of 2012 the preferred approach was to create a single code base that can run under both Python 2 and 3 using compatibility modules.
