What is Python?

Python is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted programming language created by Guido van Rossum and first released in 1991. It emphasizes code readability and simplicity, using indentation to define code blocks instead of braces. Python supports multiple programming paradigms: procedural, object-oriented, and functional. It is dynamically typed (types are checked at runtime) and garbage-collected. Python's vast standard library and the PyPI ecosystem (over 400,000 packages) make it suitable for web development, data science, machine learning, automation, scripting, scientific computing, and much more. Python 3 (current) is not backwards-compatible with Python 2 (which reached end-of-life in 2020).