What is Python?

Python is said to be a “Charming, elegant, and mysterious” language, but how did it come to be? Well, Python was created by a Dutchman named Guido Van Rossum, who lived in the Netherlands working as a programmer at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatics (CWI). CWI is a research lab is funded by the government that specializes in advanced math and computer science research. Guidos' first job at CWI was to work on a programming language named ABC. This project was short-lived. After project ABC, Guido worked on amoeba; this was a distributed system built collaboratively at CWI. Amoeba is essential to the development of python because Guido realized that every application that he had to write for amoeba was essentially a shell script or a C program. He thought that there were downsides to both of those. He wished that there was a third language in between the middle of those that felt like a proper programming language like C but very concise like shell scripts. He wanted all of this done without the “terrible properties in terms of readability of shell scripts” - Guido. This is the beginning of python! Guido started developing python in the late 1980s as a successor to the ABC programming language as a hobby to keep himself from boredom during the Christmas season. This hobby turned into something big. He started thinking of all of the benefits that he could use this language for. His thought was that it might take three months to make the interpreter, but he and many other people would save three months in productivity using the language.After spending some time developing, Guido had to come up with a name for his new language. Since he was a fan of the Monty Pythons Flying Circus (Comedy troupe from the 1970s), he decided to name his interpreted language “Python.” Python was finally released as open-source in February 1991. This first public version was 0.9.0. This early python version included special handling functions at the core data types that included list, dict, str, and many others.After Guido created python, he was recognized as the BDFL (benevolent dictator for life) of the programming language.While Guido was still in the BDFL, he joined a corporation for a national research initiative. While being in this corporation, he received mail from Ken Manheimer requesting access to some BDFL privileges for a semi-formal team of developers who would oversee pythons development and workshops, which would make Guido first interim BDFL. As you would expect, with time comes progress. In Jan 1994 version 1.0 was released; this update had additional features such as functional programming tools lambda, map, filter, and reduce. Guido didn’t really like the additional featuers in version 1.0 therefore in October 2000 the python code 2.0 was released. This version came with a list of comprehensions, a full garbage collector, and supported Unicode. After 8 years of success, python released one of its biggest changes, this was version 3.0, also known as python 3000 or pi 3k. Python 3 was not an update, but an entirely new code that removed the duplicate constructs and modules of the previous versions as an attempt to fufill the 13th law; the zen of python. The zen of python was made by Tim Peters also known as “The python Doctrine.” The zen of python is a poem to list out the doctrine and philosophies of python, which can be accessed by typing the code “import this” into the python IDLE. The poem goes exactly like this, “beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts. Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules. Although practicality beats purity. Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly silenced. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. There should only be one - and preferably only one -obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless your ditch. Now is better than ever. Although never is often better than right now. If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea. Namespaces are one honking idea let’s do more of those!”Just like many other languages, python began with only one flavor, but as time goes on many people like to alter the language to thier specific needs by, therefore there is now tons of python flavors! Some of these flavors are a a combination of python and another language. Some examples include CPython: this language is written in C and is the most common effectuation of python. Another example would be Brython: which is a browser python that runs in the browser!

Python is an interpreted high-level, general-purpose programming language with English-like syntax. The simplicity in the syntax is one of the biggest reasons that python is so popular today!

Python History

Python Projects

Rock Paper Scissors:

There are many ways to program the rock paper scissors game but this is the way that I decided to create it. Modify it to your liking :)