Happy Birthday Python
A part of the series today in programming history
February 20, 1991: A Hobby Project Called Python
35 years ago today, Guido van Rossum posted his side project to the internet. It now runs the world.
It was a Wednesday in February. At the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam, a 35-year-old Dutch programmer named Guido van Rossum uploaded a compressed archive to alt.sources, a Usenet newsgroup where people shared source code the way you might toss a paperback into a communal free library. The file contained version 0.9.0 of a programming language he’d been tinkering with during the Christmas break of 1989 — a language he’d named after Monty Python’s Flying Circus, not the snake.
It was not a big deal. There was no press release. No product launch. No venture funding. Just a guy who thought programming could be more pleasant.
The itch Guido was scratching
Van Rossum had spent years working on ABC, a teaching language developed at CWI. ABC was elegant in theory but frustrating in practice — it was rigid, closed, and difficult to extend. He loved its clean syntax and readability but hated that it couldn’t talk to the outside world. You couldn’t write a script to rename files. You couldn’t glue two programs together. ABC was a beautiful room with no doors.
Python was Van Rossum’s answer: keep ABC’s readability, but make the language practical, extensible, and open. Even that first 0.9.0 release came with features that still define Python today — classes with inheritance, exception handling, core data types like lists and dictionaries, and a module system borrowed from Modula-3. The bones were there from day one.
He later described his design philosophy in a way that has become almost a mantra: code is read more often than it is written. Every choice Python made — significant whitespace, minimal syntax, explicit over implicit — flowed from that single insight.
The long, quiet rise
Python did not take off immediately. Through the 1990s, it was a niche tool, beloved by system administrators and scientists but unknown to most programmers. Perl dominated scripting. Java dominated enterprise. C++ dominated everything else.
But Python kept growing. Version 1.0 arrived in January 1994, adding functional programming tools like lambda, map, and filter. Van Rossum took on the tongue-in-cheek title “Benevolent Dictator for Life” — a joke that stuck for 27 years.
Python 2.0 shipped in October 2000 with list comprehensions and garbage collection. Then the language entered the long, painful Python 2 versus Python 3 split — a decade-long migration that tested the community’s patience but ultimately proved that sometimes you have to break things to fix them.
And then something happened that nobody predicted. Machine learning exploded, and the researchers reaching for a programming language overwhelmingly reached for Python. NumPy, pandas, scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch — the entire modern AI stack was built on Python’s foundations. A language designed to be pleasant for humans turned out to be the perfect interface for teaching machines.
The coincidence
Here’s a small, delightful fact. Python 3.2.0 was released on February 20, 2011 — exactly 20 years to the day after 0.9.0. Guido van Rossum himself noted the coincidence on Twitter: “The first Python version, 0.9.0, was released on Feb 20, 1991. Python 3.2.0 was released exactly 20 years later, on Feb 20, 2011.”
Today, 35 years after that quiet Usenet post, Python is the most popular programming language on the planet by most measures. It is used to train AI models, analyze genomes, build web applications, automate infrastructure, teach introductory computer science, and write the scripts that hold together roughly half of the internet’s plumbing. Stack Overflow’s annual survey has placed it at or near the top for years running. GitHub shows it as the most-used language on the platform.
All of this from a Christmas holiday project by a programmer who just thought coding should feel nicer.
What we can learn from Python at 35
The history of technology is full of ambitious projects backed by massive teams and enormous budgets that failed spectacularly. Python’s success story is the opposite: a single person with good taste, a clear philosophy, and the patience to let a community grow organically around a shared set of values.
Van Rossum didn’t try to make the fastest language, or the most theoretically pure, or the most feature-rich. He tried to make the most humane. And it turned out that optimizing for the programmer’s experience — for readability, for simplicity, for the idea that there should be one obvious way to do something — was the most powerful optimization of all.
Happy birthday, Python. Thirty-five never looked so good.
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Sources: Guido van Rossum’s “History of Python” blog; Python documentation; Computer History Museum; van Rossum’s original alt.sources post, February 20, 1991.