Section 1.2. Origins

1.2. Origins

Work on Python began in late 1989 by Guido van Rossum, then at CWI (Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science) in the Netherlands. It was eventually released for public distribution in early 1991. How did it all begin? Like C, C++, Lisp, Java, and Perl, Python came from a research background where the programmer was having a hard time getting the job done with the existing tools at hand, and envisioned and developed a better way.

At the time, van Rossum was a researcher with considerable language design experience with the interpreted language ABC, also developed at CWI, but he was unsatisfied with its ability to be developed into something more. Having used and partially developed a higher-level language like ABC, falling back to C was not an attractive possibility. Some of the tools he envisioned were for performing general system administration tasks, so he also wanted access to the power of system calls that were available through the Amoeba distributed operating system. Although van Rossum gave some thought to an Amoeba-specific language, a generalized language made more sense, and late in 1989, the seeds of Python were sown.