How it began
Python originated at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in Amsterdam. Guido van Rossum, a software engineer there, designed the language in December 1989 and finished a first working version some months later in 1990. He released it to the public as version 0.9.0 on February 20, 1991, by posting it to the alt.sources newsgroup. He named it after the British comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Before it existed
Van Rossum had worked at the institute on ABC, an interpreted language intended to make programming approachable for people who were not specialists. Python was designed as a successor to ABC that could also handle exceptions and talk to the Amoeba operating system being developed at the institute. He later wrote that his experience in the ABC group taught him a great deal about language design and was the source of many Python features.
How it works
Python is an interpreted language: programs are run directly, and a programmer can type statements and see results at once. From ABC it took the use of indentation to group statements, in place of brackets or keywords, and very high-level built-in data types, though the details differ. Van Rossum described it as easy to learn and easy to use, working in a very interactive way so that programmers and scientists handling data get results quickly.
How it spread
From the start Python was distributed freely, in the manner later called open source, and users formed a community that contributed improvements. In 1995 van Rossum moved to the United States, where he worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, Google and Dropbox. He received the Free Software Foundation's Award for the Advancement of Free Software in 2001.
Where it stands today
By 2015, according to an article for the Association for Computing Machinery, Python had appeared for many years on lists of the ten most-used programming languages. Large users named in that article included Dropbox, Google, Mozilla and Walt Disney Animation Studios, as well as banks, universities, NASA and CERN. Van Rossum credited the open distribution of the language and its active community of users for its success.
