History of Python Origins and Creation Design Philosophy Python s design philosophy is summarized in the document The Zen of Python PEP 20 It includes attributes such as Readability counts Now is better than never There should be one and preferably only one obvious way to do it Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you re Dutch Guido van Rossum Python s creator wanted to make Python easy to read and write He also wanted to make it easy for beginners to learn programming Creation Python was created in the late 1980s by Guido van Rossum at CWI in the Netherlands as a successor to the ABC language It was named after the British comedy group Monty Python a favorite of van Rossum Python 1 0 was released in 1994 with many of the features that are still present in the language today including Built in data types Expressions and statements Functions Modules List comprehensions Garbage collection system Unicode support Python 2 0 released in 2000 introduced new features such as Python Development and Release Timelines Python is continuously being developed and maintained by the Python Software Foundation PSF The latest version of Python is 3 9 Python s development is organized into a series of releases which are designated by a version number These releases are broken down into three categories Major releases These releases contain new features and changes to the language that are not backward compatible backward compatible Minor releases These releases contain new features and changes to the language that are Micro releases These releases contain bug fixes and security updates that are backward compatible The release timeline for Python is as follows Major releases are made every 18 24 months Minor releases are made every 6 months Micro releases are made as needed This release timeline allows for a stable and predictable schedule for new features and bug fixes in the language