Was python created in the UK?

Birth History

The founder of Python is Guido van Rossum. During the Christmas period of 1989, in order to kill time in Amsterdam, Guido van Rossum decided to develop a new script interpreter as a successor to the ABC language. Python was chosen as the name of the program because he is a fan of the BBC TV series Monty Python's Flying Circus. ABC is a teaching language co-designed by Guido. In Guido's opinion, the language ABC is very beautiful and powerful, and is specially designed for non-professional programmers. However, the ABC language did not succeed. Guido believes that the reason is due to lack of openness. Guido was determined to avoid this mistake in Python, and achieved very good results, perfectly combining C and a few other languages.

In this way, Python was born in the hands of Guido. In fact, the first implementation was on Mac computers. It can be said that Python developed from ABC and was mainly influenced by Modula-3 (another very beautiful and powerful language designed for small groups). And combines the habits of Unix shell and C.

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Currently, Guido is still the main developer of Python and determines the development direction of the entire Python language. The Python community often calls him the Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL).

Python 2.0 was released on October 16, 2000, adding full garbage collection and support for Unicode. At the same time, the entire development process is more transparent, and the community's influence on the development progress is gradually expanded.

Python 3.0 was released on December 3, 2008. This version is not fully compatible with previous Python source code. However, many new features were later ported to older Python 2.6/2.7 versions.

Design philosophy and features

Python is a completely object-oriented language. Functions, modules, numbers, and strings are all objects. And it fully supports inheritance, overloading, derivation, and multiple inheritance, which is beneficial to enhance the reusability of source code. Python supports overloaded operators, so Python also supports generic design. Compared with Lisp, a traditional functional programming language, Python only provides limited support for functional programming. There are two standard libraries (functools, itertools) that provide functional programming tools similar to those in Haskell and Standard ML.

Although Python may be roughly classified as a "scripting language", it is actually widely used by some large-scale software development projects such as Zope, Mnet and BitTorrent, and Google. Supporters of Python prefer to call it a high-end dynamic programming language. The reason is that "scripting language" generally refers to a language that only performs simple programming tasks, such as shell script, VBScript and other programming languages ​​​​that can only handle simple tasks and cannot Comparable to Python.

Python itself is designed to be extensible. Not all features and functionality are integrated into the language core. Python provides a rich API and tools so that programmers can easily use C, C, and Cython to write extension modules. The Python compiler itself can also be integrated into other programs that require a scripting language. Therefore, many people use Python as a "glue language". Use Python to integrate and encapsulate programs written in other languages. Many projects within Google, such as the Google Application Service Engine, use C to write parts with extremely high performance requirements, and then use Python or Java/Go to call the corresponding modules. [6] Alex Martelli, author of "Python Technical Manual" said: "It's hard to say, but in 2004, Python was already used internally at Google, and Google recruited many Python experts, but before that Decided to use Python. Their purpose is to use Python as much as possible, and switch to C when necessary; use C when controlling hardware, and use Python during rapid development." [7]

The design philosophy of Python is " Elegant, clear, simple. The philosophy of Python developers is "use one way, preferably only one way to do one thing", so it is very different from other languages ​​​​that have obvious personal styles. When designing the Python language, if faced with multiple choices, Python developers will generally reject fancy syntax and choose syntax that clearly has no or little ambiguity. These guidelines are called "Python Maxims". Run import this within the Python interpreter to get the complete list.

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