Python is a high level programming language created by Guido van Rossum in late 1980’s. It’s a popular general purpose programming language widely used in data science field. It facilitates several programming paradigms including procedural programming, object oriented programming and functional programming. It was first released in 1991 as Python 0.9.0. Python 2 was released in 2000 and discontinued in 2020 with the release of the version 2.7.18. At the moment, Python 3 which was released in 2008 is at the version 3.11.0 (As at Nov 5th 2022).
The name of the programming language is inspired from the BBC Comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Guido van Rossum thought that it’s short,unique and slightly mysterious. Users who are knowledgeable and experienced are refereed as “Pythonistas”.
The core philosophy of the Language can be listed as
- Beautiful is better than ugly.
- Explicit is better than implicit.
- Simple is better than complex.
- Complex is better than complicated.
- Readability counts.
Rather than trying to build everything into the core, the language prefers a modular structure where you can install various modules to extend the functionality. It try to create simple and less cluttered syntax for coding while giving the programmer the power to choose their coding methodology.
Another philosophy adopted by the language is “there should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it” rather than “here is more than one way to do it. It’s generally considered that describing something as “clever” is not considered a compliment when programming in Python.