Python

A popular, object-oriented scripting language used for writing system utilities and Internet scripts. It is also used as a glue language for integrating components in C and C++. Created by Guido van Rossum in Amsterdam in the early 1990s, it was named after the BBC comedy series "Monty Python's Flying Circus." Python is an interpreted language that compiles to bytecode and requires a "virtual machine" for runtime execution. It uses elements from C, C++ and Modula and supports interfaces to popular functions and libraries such as Unix sockets, the Tk GUI library, Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) and X11.

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In the words of its author, “the other scripting language” (other than Perl, that is). Python's design is notably clean, elegant, and well thought through; it tends to attract the sort of programmers who find Perl grubby and exiguous. Some people revolt at its use of whitespace to define logical structure by indentation, objecting that this harks back to the horrible old fixed-field languages of the 1960s. Python's relationship with Perl is rather like the BSD community's relationship to Linux — it's the smaller party in a (usually friendly) rivalry, but the average quality of its developers is generally conceded to be rather higher than in the larger community it competes with. There's a Python resource page at http://www.python.org. See also Guido, BDFL.