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Python as a programming language
Over the last 40+ years of computer science, programming languages have developed from assembly and machine code towards high-level abstracted languages, which are much closer to English. The Python programming language, begun by Guido van Rossum in 1989, was designed to overcome issues that programmers were dealing with in the 1980s: slow development time, overly complicated syntax, and horrible readability. He developed Python as a language that would enable rapid code development and testing, have beautiful (or at least readable) syntax, and produce results with fewer lines of code, in less time. The first version of Python (0.9.0) was released in 1991, and it has always been free to download and use.
Go to https://www.python.org/ to explore Python documentation, try tutorials, get help, find useful Python code libraries, and download Python. Python has multiple major and minor versions. For much of the book, we are using Python 2.7, which is installed automatically along with ArcGIS for Desktop. For chapters on ArcGIS Pro, we will use Python 3.5.