History of Python

In December 1989, Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum was looking for a holiday project. He had been working on the ABC language at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam and wanted to create something better — a scripting language that was powerful yet genuinely readable. He named it Python, not after the snake, but after his favorite comedy troupe: Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Python 1.0 was released in 1991, introducing features that would become its hallmarks: significant whitespace (indentation as syntax), dynamic typing, and a philosophy that “there should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it.” That guiding idea is now captured in The Zen of Python (import this), Easter egg and manifesto in one.

The language grew through the 2000s as the internet exploded, with Python 2 powering everything from Google’s early crawlers to scientific computing pipelines. The long-anticipated Python 3 (2008) cleaned up decades of design debt but required a slow, painful migration from Python 2 — a real-world lesson in the cost of backwards-incompatible changes. Python 2 was officially sunset on January 1, 2020.

Today Python consistently ranks #1 or #2 in every major language popularity index, fueled by its dominance in data science, machine learning, AI, and web development. It is the most common first language taught in CS programs worldwide, and the language powering tools like TensorFlow, NumPy, Django, and Flask.

This short documentary traces Python from Guido’s Amsterdam apartment to the global ecosystem it became. It covers the key milestones — the ABC language roots, the Python 1.0 release, the rise of Python 2, the controversial Python 3 transition, and Python’s eventual ascent to the top of the programming world.

Watch for the moment Guido explains the indentation philosophy: clean code shouldn’t need braces to tell you it’s a block. That design choice felt radical in 1991 and is now the feature novice coders most quickly come to love.