Python's Evolution: From Inception to Advancement

Python programming language stands out as a boastful yet simple language in the programming sphere. In my last two years as a programmer, Python has emerged as my go-to programming language whenever I want to complete any task from automation of my spreadsheets, scraping sites and even doing simple school projects such as data analysis. The programming language enjoys huge popularity in the programming community ranking first with a market share of 31.17% (Carbonelle, 2020). So, what makes programmers’ hearts pound whenever they hear Python? First, let us take a look at what Python is. According to Mehta (2019) “Python is an object-oriented, multi-paradigm and a structured programming language” (para. 1). My interactions with this undecorated yet robust language got me thinking to how far this language has come from since its inception in the late 1990s. Python programming language has moved from a hobby project of its creator to one of the most powerful and the most popular programming language in the world.

The genesis of this language was modest. Guido Van Rossum was the brain behind this intriguing language. Some of us in the programming sphere just to him as “Python’s Benevolent dictator For Life” (Fairchild, 2018, para. 1). He earned the title because he always had the final say in Python’s decisions. Khamlichi (2015) quotes Guido saying “Over six years ago, in December 1989, I was looking for a hobby programming project that would keep me occupied during the week around Christmas” (para. 17). He was explaining how he came up with Python. Khamlichi (2015) quotes him further saying “I decided to write an interpreter for the new scripting language I had been thinking about lately: a descendant of ABC that would appeal to Unix/C hackers” (para. 17)

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Furthermore, one may be quick to conclude that the language’s name is that of the breed of snake referred to as ‘python.’ Guido credits the name of the language to a popular comedy show in the 1970s that he liked. According to Mehta (2019) “Van Rossum was a big fan of a popular BBC comedy tv show which used to air in the 1970s called as Monty Python’s Fly Circus” (para. 5). Python’s original blueprint was to inherit from the ABC language and was released in 1991. (Srivastav, 2016). This new baby language had been equipped with some new features not seen in other languages. Pramanick (2019) states “it had more than enough capability to provide classes with inheritance, several core data types exception handling and functions” (para. 2)

Python has had various versions being released over the years since its inception. As just a novice programmer with a few months of experience (about nine months or so), I have gotten the chance to interact with its third version i.e. Python 3.0 particularly its latest release version 3.8.1. But long before version 3.0 there was 0.9.0, 1.0 and 2.0. The first version was released in 1991 (Wolfe, 2018). Python version 1.0 was released in 1994 (Manoj, 2019). Manoj (2019) found it had “features like functional programming tools filter, reduce, map and lambda” (para. 3). Though this version was released a long time ago, I still use some of its inherited features such as the ‘lambda function’ which helps in programming mathematical problems.

Later in 2000, Python 2.0 was released. Wolfe (2018) says that this version was “more of an open-source project from members of the National Research Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science” (para. 5). He states further “This version of Python included list comprehensions, a full garbage collector, and it supported Unicode” (Wolfe, 2018, para. 5). Python version 2.0 shares a lot of similarities with Python version 3.0 with some minor tweaks here and there.

The current version (version 3.0) that most of us Python programmers are using was released in 2008. It is also referred to as “Py3K” or “Python 3000” (Manoj, 2019). This version brags of simplified features and most of us prefer this to the other versions. These features include changing of print statement to now being a function, use of easier rules in arranging comparisons and use of views and iterators instead of lists (Manoj, 2019). What mostly I have enjoyed in using this version is the use of formatted strings which is not found in very many programming languages. It allows one to insert code expressions directly (Sturtz, 2020). The formatted strings have been very influential in reducing clutter in my code and saving on time.

Python’s industry strides have been redefining. Its standard library gives every programmer of this language a r