About Python 3

- [Instructor] Python is a modern, object-oriented scripting language. Python was developed in the late 1980s by Dutch research programmer Guido van Rossum. Guido wrote the first Python interpreter over his Christmas holiday in 1989. He chose the name Python as a reference to Monty Python's Flying Circus. Guido remains Python's principal author to this day, and the Python community affectionately refers to him as BDFL, Benevolent Dictator For Life. There's a core philosophy behind the Python language, which includes the following statements: Beautiful is better than ugly.

It's always a good idea to make your code elegant and readable. Explicit is better than implicit. Don't make your readers guess what your code does, make it obvious. Simple is better than complex. If you can make it simple, do. Complex is better than complicated. If complexity is necessary, don't complicate it. Readability counts. As a casual reader with a good understanding of the Python language, you should be able to understand the code with a minimal amount of effort.

For the complete list, simply type Import This into any Python interpreter. Python 3 is very close to Guido's ideal vision for Python. Code written for Python 2 must be ported for use with Python 3. All data types, including functions and classes, are now built on Python's object model. In Python 2, print was a keyword, and it didn't require parentheses. In Python 3 it is a function, and it does require parentheses.

Python 2 had separate types for integers and long integers. Now there is just one integer type. Python 2 had separate types of strings for Unicode, Ascii, and APID data. All text is now Unicode, and there's a separate APID data type. This course teaches Python 3. There's a lot of legacy code written for Python 2, and it may be important to maintain it for a while. As I record this course, Python 3 has been around almost 10 years, and the amount of legacy code is diminishing.

I strongly recommend that you write new code using Python 3 exclusively. Python is a rich language, and it would be impossible for me to cover all of it in the time allotted for this course. The online documentation is both accessible and exhaustive. I recommend you become familiar with it. Python is a very powerful and versatile programming language. It's supported on virtually all common operating systems and it's easy to learn and to support. In the rest of this course, I'll show you the essentials of Python, so you may develop quick and easy solutions to common problems, as well as larger, more complex interactive systems.