History of Python

Python was invented by Guido van Rossum who is a Dutch computer programmer at the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science. Python was released in 1991 and was named after the Brit-com Monty Python's Flying Circus.

It has since been developed by a large team of volunteers and available from the Python Software Foundation. The most recent version of Python, 2.5, was released in September, 2006.

Python is now found in many incarnations.

-  At the website of the Python Software Foundation, Python is written in C.

-  A Java-based version of Python exists in Jython and may be used to work with Java code natively. - - Iron Python, a C# version, exists for the .Net and Mono platforms and allows C# programmers access to Python's power and flexibility.

For purposes of research and development, there is also a Python implementation written in Python itself. In order to enable Python programmers to change the behaviour of the Python interpreter, the project PyPy was founded in 2003. While it is an open source project, being developed openly by a community of developers for free distribution and modification, PyPy is also supported by the European Union as a Specified Targeted Research Project (STReP), part of the FP6 funding program.

Python is a general purpose programming language that is able to be used on any modern computer operating system. It is used daily in the operations of the Google search engine, YouTube, NASA , and the New York Stock Exchange.

Source: http://python.about.com/od/gettingstarted/ss/whatispython_2.htm#step-heading