How old is python language

We can learn from other languages. We have a good experience with respecting the importance of backwards compatibility. Galindo: I would be a horrible King for a day. The first order of business would be to fix all these things that we have acquired over the years in the language. That would require breaking a bunch of things. Obviously, I will not do that, but I think one of the things I really would like to see in the future is for Python to become faster than it is. I think Python still has a lot of potential to become faster.

But one can dream. VentureBeat: What do you know now about Python today that you wish you knew when you first began using it? Galindo: I think the most important thing I learned is how many different uses there are for Python.

It would be good if people could be empathetic to us changing the language when we have to balance these things. They need to specifically understand how the ecosystem and the languages will transform the organization. Python Institute. What is Python? Python goals In , Guido van Rossum defined his goals for Python: an easy and intuitive language just as powerful as those of the major competitors; open source , so anyone can contribute to its development; code that is as understandable as plain English ; suitable for everyday tasks , allowing for short development times.

Why Python? Python in Action Where can we see Python in action? Many developing tools are implemented in Python. Python Examples Python is a great choice for: Web and Internet development e. Desktop GUIs e. We use cookies to understand how you use our site and to improve your experience.

We assume you are okay with this, but you can opt out if you wish. C was the primary language he and the other researchers used. He began to create a new language in his free time that would let him work faster. Little did he know that this side project would eventually become one of the most popular, widespread programming languages in the world.

The appeal of Python has always been its simplicity and unique mixture of C with bash script capabilities. Van Rossum drew heavily on the ABC programming language but included tools for dynamic types and imperative programming as well. So he decided on the name Python for his new language because it was unique and mysterious. Python began to slowly rise in popularity after its open-source release on alt.

Overall, Python is designed to do more work on its own than most languages to allow the developer to focus on their work. Python 1 launched in with new features for functional programming, including lambda , map, filter and reduce. It also included features from 0. Python 1. During this period, Perl was the most popular scripting language, and Python was too immature to be used at wide scale.

Enjoying the article? Scroll down to sign up for our free, bi-monthly newsletter. Python 2 launched in with big changes to source code storage. It introduced many desired features like unicode support, list comprehension, and garbage collection. A bit later, Python 2. Around this time, many programmers used to adopt Python as an alternate scripting language.

Since Java was dominating in the world of enterprise-sized applications, Python was used in smaller, niche applications. Even Java developers started using Python to increase their coding speed due to its interoperability. Python 2. This adds 65, additional supported symbols from non-latin script languages like Russian, Chinese, or Arabic. It also added support for non-letter characters like emojis.

You can also use unicode to encode your own strings to a unique designation. Calling that unique designation later in your code allows you to reference that same encoded string without using additional space or saving it in a variable.

List comprehensions are used to create new lists from from other iterables. List comprehensions take and return a list, allowing you to trim a list by a certain criteria or to create a new list with newly manipulated elements. The following shows how you can use list comprehensions to return a new list with only elements that are present in both passed lists. In the old system, each object would contain a counter that records how many other objects are pointing to it.

The object was then automatically deleted once that counter reached zero. The cycles use additional overhead but reduce the risk of a memory leak. Overhead costs of the deletion cycles have since been reduced due to optimizations. Practice cutting-edge Python techniques as you prepare for your coding interview.

Python 3. The main mission of the update was to remove fundamental design flaws with the language by deleting duplicate modules and constructs. Removing many duplicate tools unfortunately meant that all previous Python 2 code was not compatible with Python 3.

Python also provided support for functions such as lambda, map, and filter, which proved extremely useful in a lot of cases," he says. Python may never have existed at all had the popular programming languages in the late '80s been better, with one of van Rossum's motivations for creating Python being the incompatibility of the Perl scripting language with the Amoeba distributed computing system he was working on at CWI. Even though Python attracted a user base of hard-core fans after its release, in the s Python was still very much a programming language underdog.

Today Python is the fastest-growing programming language in terms of active developers, according to the annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey , one of the most comprehensive snapshots of programming language use available, while Perl has shrunk to the point where it didn't get a mention in the latest Stack Overflow report. That explosive growth is captured by the graph below, showing how in recent years views of questions related to Python on Stack Overflow grew far faster than views of questions related to other languages.

The growth in views of Python questions on Stack Overflow relative to other programming languages reflects the huge growth in Python users. So how did Python leapfrog its erstwhile rival, and how to explain the two languages' vastly different fortunes?

Van Rossum believes it has something to do with how easy it is to maintain a code base once it grows beyond a certain size. While in Python, even if you don't have all that much discipline, the code will still be fairly readable and fairly maintainable. That combination of Python offering a programming language that is simple to get started with but that is also robust enough to be used to write large applications is what van Rossum attributes to its initial success in the s.

As use of Python spread in the s, van Rossum, still working at CWI, found his creation was increasingly putting him in contact with people from across the world. I was having the time of my life," he says. By the mid s, Python was starting to be used in new ways, from scripts for audio recording and playback to its first foray into web development, which would go on to become a mainstay for Python.

Gartner's Ryan says what sealed Python's popularity among developers during the s was how it became a favorite choice for quickly creating powerful scripts. More than that, however, Ryan says the language was sufficiently versatile and so easy to pick up that it appealed to many different types of users with a range of technical expertise. Foreshadowing how Python would come to be favored by researchers and scientists for its ease of use, McLay was interested in how Python could be used by scientists at the NBS who van Rossum says "had a considerable amount of data to process but weren't very good coders".

That placement would prove to be the catalyst for both Python's future evolution and a major change in van Rossum's life. It was during this placement that the very first Python workshop would be held at the NBS's offices, where van Rossum, Barry Warsaw, and other early Python enthusiasts came together to discuss what they were doing with Python and hopes for the language's future development.

That meeting resulted in a job offer to come work with Kahn at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives CNRI , a nonprofit research group based in Virginia focused on the strategic development of network technologies. Just as Python had answered the need for a new type of programming language, van Rossum says the job offer came at exactly the time when he was starting to question his future at CWI.

Earlier, also, as a result of Python, some other prospects had come my way where, after a bunch of phone calls and thinking, I had decided not to go for it. But here, I liked the people, I liked what they were offering me, the project, and I went for it. It was at CNRI that van Rossum put together many of the structures for managing the Python language, with the help of a team of fellow Python enthusiasts.

After joining CNRI in April , van Rossum led a small team of developers working on building Knowbot Programs , software known as mobile agents designed to be run across distributed computer systems like the internet. The community of Python users had grown significantly since its public release in , and by the second half of the decade the language was attracting a sizeable global user base.

During that period, the management of the language began to be formalized, with the establishment of the precursor to the Python Software Foundation PSF , which would be set up in As the community grew, the biannual Python workshops that started in morphed into larger annual events, and eventually PSF's annual PyCon, which is still going strong today.

By the turn of the 21st century, the language was larger than any one person, with a sizeable community playing an active role in its development, a long way from the summer of , when early Python users fretted about what would happen to the language ' if Guido was hit by a bus '. Van Rossum continued to play a core role, however, and the idea of him being at the heart of the language never went away, as evidenced by him being nicknamed "Benevolent dictator for life" BDFL of the language, a tongue-in-cheek title that stuck for years.

Gartner's Ryan says it's not particularly unusual for a language's creator to act as that language's steward, citing Larry Wall with Perl and Ryan Dahl with the JavaScript runtime Node. Indeed, it's the open nature of Python's development, via public debate between a community of core developers, that van Rossum attributes to being a deciding factor in Python's success.

In the intervening years, there have been major leaps forward in Python, the introduction of Python 3. Those changes were triggered last year, when van Rossum stepped down from his leadership role as BDFL, following public disagreement over the introduction of Assignment Expressions to the language, mooted in the Python Enhancement Proposal PEP While their introduction was designed to make it possible to write more efficient code, van Rossum faced heavy criticism online from those opposed to the change, with some arguing their use would make code less readable and harder to maintain.

Van Rossum says he was used to debate over new features, but it was the intransigence of some of his detractors and also the personal nature of certain attacks that made up his mind to step down. I felt attacked behind my back," he says. Either a clear consensus would appear or, if it was not so clear, I would mull it over in my head and decide one way or another.