Python for Decision Makers and Business Leaders Transcripts
Chapter: Welcome to the course
Lecture: A very brief history of Python
Login or
purchase this course
to watch this video and the rest of the course contents.
0:00
Let's take just a quick moment and have a very, very brief history lesson. We'll talk about a brief history of Python. Python was created back in 1990
0:10
by this guy named Guido van Rossum. He's been involved in the Python space ever since and he's still involved today. Let's look at a timeline.
0:20
So, 1990, Python was released. Guido actually started on it maybe 2 years before that. In 2000, we have Python 2.
0:27
This was a big improvement to Python coming out. In 2005, one of the most popular web frame works, Django
0:35
appeared, and really put Python on solid ground in the web development space. Since then there have been many, many others
0:42
such as: Flask, Starlette, Pyramid, and so on and we'll talk about those, but this was one of the first major, major web frame works.
0:50
In 2008, Python 3 came out, and this turns out to be more controversial than you might think and this is the reason I put those two timelines on there.
0:59
Many of the folks had built their code and their libraries, and projects on Python 2 and were reluctant to change. The actual change was not that big
1:08
but the consequence of those things that needed changed well, that turned out to be pretty huge. For a long time in the Python community
1:15
there was this divide of people sticking to the old stuff and the progress being done on the newer, modern Python Python 3, luckily that's solved.
1:23
That is basically a done issue, except for legacy code these days. In 2012, as we'll see later, the data scientists moved to Python en masse.
1:32
For whatever reason, they just hit critical mass there and tons of data scientists already coming over
1:38
and it became an incredible area of growth for Python. There's many, many, many libraries and tools
1:44
for data scientists, and it's one of the more popular areas where Python is used these days. But there's a clear inflection point around 2012
1:53
when this happened. I'm not actually sure what it was that triggered it or precipitated it, but, there it is on the timeline.
2:00
Finally, why is this Python 2/3 being not a debate anymore? Because, in 2020, Python 2 will be end of life.
2:08
No security fixes, no updates, no more support, it's done. There'll probably be places like Red Hat, potentially
2:15
where you can go and pay for commercial extended support but it's kind of like saying, Hey, should we stick or maybe move to Windows XP or Windows 95?
2:25
No, and people are also not moving to Python 2. It's pretty much settled. Like I said, the reason I bring this up
2:30
is if this is a hesitation for you, this 2 versus 3 thing it's gone. Really, all the modern libraries are on Python 3.
2:38
It's Python 2 that's being left behind. So, here's a quick history of Python.