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Python - Microsoft Ships Python Code in 1996

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Microsoft Ships Python Code in 1996 My thanks go to Guido for allowing me to share my own history of Python! I'll save my introduction to Python for another post, but the end result was its introduction into a startup that I co-founded in 1991 with several people. We were working on a large client/server system to handle Business-to-Consumer electronic shopping. Custom TCP protocols operating over the old X.25 network, and all that. Old school. In 1995, we realized, contrary to our earlier beliefs, that more consumers actually  were  on the Internet, and that we needed a system for our customers (the vendors) to reach Internet-based consumers. I was tasked to figure out our approach, and selected Python as my prototyping tool. Our first problem was moving to an entirely browser-based solution. Our custom client was no longer viable, so we needed a new shopping experience for the consumer, and server infrastructure to support that. At that time, talking to a web browser meant writin
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Python - Personal History - Part 2, CNRI and Beyond

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Personal History - part 2, CNRI and beyond The Python workshop (see previous posting) resulted in a job offer to come work on mobile agents at CNRI (the Corporation for National Research Initiatives). CNRI is a non-profit research lab in Reston, Virginia. I joined in April 1995. CNRI’s director, Bob Kahn, was the first to point out to me how much Python has in common with Lisp, despite being completely different at a superficial (syntactic) level. Python work at CNRI was funded indirectly by a DARPA grant for mobile agent research. Although there was DARPA support for projects that used Python, there was not much direct support for language development itself. At CNRI, I led and helped hire a small team of developers to build a mobile agent system in pure Python. The initial team members were Roger Masse and Barry Warsaw who were bitten by the Python bug at the Python workshop at NIST. In addition, we hired Python community members Ken Manheimer and Fred Drake. Jeremy Hylton, an MIT gr
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Python - Personal History - Part 1, CWI

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Personal History - part 1, CWI Python’s early development started at a research institute in Amsterdam called  CWI , which is a Dutch acronym for a phrase that translates into English as Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science. CWI is an interesting place; funded by the Dutch government’s Department of Education and other research grants, it conducts academic-level research into computer science and mathematics. At any given time there are plenty of Ph.D. students wandering about and old-timers in the profession may still remember its original name, the Mathematical Centre. Under this name, it was perhaps most famous for the invention of  Algol 68 . I started working at CWI in late 1982, fresh out of university, as a programmer in the  ABC  group led by  Lambert Meertens  and  Steven Pemberton . After 4 or 5 years the ABC project was terminated due to the lack of obvious success and I moved to CWI’s  Amoeba group led by  Sape Mullender . Amoeba was a micro-kernel-based distributed
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Python - A Brief Timeline of Python

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A Brief Timeline of Python The development of Python occurred at a time when many other dynamic (and open-source) programming languages such as Tcl, Perl, and (much later) Ruby were also being actively developed and gaining popularity. To help put Python in its proper historical perspective, the following list shows the release history of Python. The earliest dates are approximate as I didn't consistently record all events: Python 2.7.7   June 1, 2014    Download   Release Notes Python 3.4.1   May 19, 2014    Download   Release Notes Python 3.4.0   March 17, 2014    Download   Release Notes Python 3.3.5   March 9, 2014    Download   Release Notes Python 3.3.4   Feb. 9, 2014    Download   Release Notes Python 3.3.3   Nov. 17, 2013    Download   Release Notes Python 2.7.6   Nov. 10, 2013    Download   Release Notes Python 2.6.9   Oct. 29, 2013    Download   Release Notes Python 3.3.2   May 15, 2013    Download   Release Notes Python 3.2.5   May 15, 2013    Download   Release Notes Py
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