Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language created by Guido van Rossum and first released in 1991, known for its readable syntax and extensive standard library.
Python emphasizes code readability, using significant indentation rather than braces to delimit blocks. It is dynamically typed and garbage-collected, and it supports procedural, object-oriented, and functional styles. Its reference implementation, CPython, is written in C, and the language is developed in the open under the stewardship of the Python Software Foundation, a nonprofit that holds its intellectual property and distributes it under a permissive license.
Python 2.0 arrived in 2000 and Python 3.0 in 2008, a deliberately backward-incompatible revision; Python 2 reached end of life on January 1, 2020. Feature releases now ship annually each October. Python 3.14, released in October 2025, added template string literals, deferred evaluation of annotations, and official support for a free-threaded build that runs without the global interpreter lock.
Python is the dominant language of data science, machine learning, and 📝Artificial Intelligence (AI), anchored by libraries such as NumPy, pandas, and PyTorch and by the Jupyter notebook environment. It is also widely used for web back ends through frameworks like Django and FastAPI, for automation and scripting, and as a first language in education. Where 📝JavaScript dominates the browser, Python dominates research and model tooling, and many agent frameworks, including 📝FastMCP for building Model Context Protocol servers, ship Python-first.