Portal:Python (programming language)
Introduction
Python is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language. Created by Guido van Rossum and first released in 1991, Python's design philosophy emphasizes code readability with its notable use of significant whitespace. Its language constructs and object-oriented approach aims to help programmers write clear, logical code for small and large-scale projects.
Python is dynamically typed and garbage-collected. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including procedural, object-oriented, and functional programming. Python is often described as a "batteries included" language due to its comprehensive standard library.
Python was conceived in the late 1980s as a successor to the ABC language. Python 2.0, released 2000, introduced features like list comprehensions and a garbage collection system capable of collecting reference cycles. Python 3.0, released 2008, was a major revision of the language that is not completely backward-compatible, and much Python 2 code does not run unmodified on Python 3. Due to concern about the amount of code written for Python 2, support for Python 2.7 (the last release in the 2.x series) was extended to 2020. Language developer Guido van Rossum shouldered sole responsibility for the project until July 2018 but now shares his leadership as a member of a five-person steering council.
Python interpreters are available for many operating systems. A global community of programmers develops and maintains CPython, an open source reference implementation. A non-profit organization, the Python Software Foundation, manages and directs resources for Python and CPython development.
Selected article
IPython is an interactive shell for the Python programming language that offers enhanced introspection compared with the standard shell, additional shell syntax, code-highlighting, and tab-completion.
A number of popular articles in the computer press have discussed the advantages of IPython, and it is a component of the SciPy package. It lends itself well to rapid-prototyping and can often be seen in conjunction with Matplotlib for scientific and engineering work.
Another notable feature is that IPython works with the major GUI frameworks (Tkinter, GTK, Qt and WX) in a non-blocking fashion allowing for interactive development and debugging of GUIs. The standard Python shell only allows this with Tkinter. Capabilities have been recently added to IPython to interactively manage highly parallel computing clusters using asynchronous status callbacks and/or classic MPI.
IPython can also be used as a system shell replacement, especially on Windows which has a minimally capable shell. IPython's default behaviour is largely familiar from Unix shells, but it allows customizability and the flexibility of executing in a live Python environment.
Selected biography
Guido van Rossum is a Dutch computer programmer who is best known as the author of the Python programming language. In the Python community, van Rossum is known as a "Benevolent Dictator for Life", meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary.
Van Rossum was born and grew up in the Netherlands, where he received a masters degree from the University of Amsterdam in 1982. He later worked for various research institutes, including the Dutch Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, Maryland, and the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), Reston, Virginia. He worked on the development of the ABC programming language.
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