Python: The Readable Programming Language Timeline

Python: The Readable Programming Language 18

1989 Guido van Rossum begins writing Python at CWI A hobby project over the Christmas holidays in Amsterdam At Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Guido van Rossum began building a new scripting language to succeed ABC. He named it after the comedy troupe Monty Python.
1991 Python 0.9.0 is posted to the alt.sources newsgroup The first public release of Python Van Rossum published the source code of Python 0.9.0 on Usenet. It already had classes with inheritance, exception handling, functions and core data types such as lists and dicts.
1994 Python 1.0 is released First major version adds functional programming tools Python reached version 1.0, which added lambda, map, filter and reduce. By then a user community was growing around the language online.
2000 Python 2.0 is released List comprehensions, garbage collection and Unicode support Python 2.0 added list comprehensions, a cycle-detecting garbage collector and Unicode strings. Development also moved to a more open, community-driven process.
2001 Python Software Foundation is founded A non-profit set up to hold Python's intellectual property The Python Software Foundation was set up to own the rights to Python, manage its licence and support its development and community.
2003 First PyCon is held in Washington, D.C. The community conference that became PyCon US The first PyCon brought Python developers together in Washington, D.C. It went on to become the language's main yearly conference and inspired PyCons around the world.
2008 Python 3.0 is released A deliberately backward-incompatible redesign of the language Python 3.0, also called Python 3000, cleaned up long-standing design flaws. It made print a function and made all strings Unicode, which started a migration that took more than a decade.
2010 Python 2.7 is released as the last Python 2 version The final feature release of the Python 2 line Python 2.7 brought several Python 3 features back to Python 2 to make migration easier. It was declared the last 2.x release and was supported for almost ten years.
2015 Python 3.5 introduces async and await Native syntax for asynchronous programming Python 3.5 added the async and await keywords for coroutines (PEP 492) and the @ operator for matrix multiplication. Both strengthened Python for web servers and scientific computing.
2018 Guido van Rossum steps down as Python's BDFL The 'Benevolent Dictator For Life' resigns after the walrus-operator dispute After a heated debate over PEP 572, the assignment expression or walrus operator, van Rossum announced a 'permanent vacation' from his role as final decision-maker. The core developers were left to choose a new form of governance.
2019 Python's first Steering Council is elected Barry Warsaw, Brett Cannon, Carol Willing, Guido van Rossum and Nick Coghlan Under PEP 13, the core developers elected a five-member Steering Council to govern the language, replacing the BDFL model. Voting closed on 4 February 2019.
2020 Python 2 reaches end of life The 'sunset' of Python 2 ends official support The core team stopped supporting Python 2 on 1 January 2020, ending the long coexistence of the two major versions. Its last release, Python 2.7.18, followed in April 2020.
2021 Python tops the TIOBE index for the first time Python overtakes C and Java in the popularity ranking In October 2021 Python reached first place in the TIOBE Programming Community Index for the first time. Its growth was driven largely by data science, machine learning and education.
2022 Python 3.11 brings major speed gains The Faster CPython project delivers big performance improvements Python 3.11 ran clearly faster than 3.10 thanks to the Faster CPython effort. It also introduced more precise error locations in tracebacks and exception groups.
2024 Python overtakes JavaScript as GitHub's most-used language GitHub's Octoverse 2024 report crowns Python GitHub's 2024 Octoverse report found that Python had passed JavaScript as the most-used language on the platform. It pointed to the boom in AI and data science projects as the cause.
2024 Python 3.13 adds experimental free-threading and a JIT First steps toward removing the Global Interpreter Lock Python 3.13 offered an optional free-threaded build without the Global Interpreter Lock (PEP 703) and an experimental JIT compiler. It also shipped a new interactive interpreter.
2025 Python 3.14 is released Free-threaded Python becomes officially supported Python 3.14 made the free-threaded build officially supported (PEP 779). It also added template string literals, or t-strings, and deferred evaluation of annotations.
2026 Python 3.15 is released with lazy imports Adds the lazy soft keyword, frozendict and UTF-8 by default Late bugs in lazy imports forced a third release candidate, so Python 3.15.0 came out on 9 October 2026 instead of the planned 1 October. It added explicit lazy imports (PEP 810), a built-in frozendict (PEP 814) and UTF-8 as the default encoding (PEP 686).