Python Programming Language Trivia Quiz

Answer: Guido van Rossum

The Python programming language was created by Guido Van Rossum in 1991.

Answer: The inventor is a fan of "Monty Python's Flying Circus".

Guido is a fan of the Monty Python's Flying Circus, a comedy series from the seventies.

Answer: C++

C++ uses the "class" keyword for describing self contained entities called "Objects" in the Object Oriented Programming jargon. Python has borrowed the "class" keyword from C++ for describing objects.

Answer: ABC, Modula-3

Guido was a member of the distributed system group at CWI in the late 80s. They used a language called 'ABC' there for scripting tasks. Guido felt it lacked certain features he wanted. He also did not want to use Bash scripting/C for routine system administration tasks. He created Python , borrowing the good features of ABC and another language called Modula-3.

Answer: Python, Perl, Ruby

Python, Perl and Ruby have strong support for regular expressions either built into the language or in the core modules. C is a much lower level language. Java also does not feature regular expression support in its core library. HTML is the markup language used to create webpages and does not support any features of programming languages.

Answer: Ideally suited for fast and memory intensive tasks like number crunching.

Python is considered to be an easy language for the novice to learn. It is also well suited for the expert in the field. It is natively object oriented and easily extendable by using languages like C/C++/Java. It allows for rapid development because of the clean and easy syntax and ability to do quick prototypes.

But owing to the fact that it uses an intepreter and its basic memory model, it is not ideally suited to perform tasks that rely on speed and memory like number crunching (Parallel processing, Numeric computations, System programming, Parsing) which are better done in languages like C/C++.

It can be used to some extent for these tasks with the help of C extension libraries.

Answer: Perl, Ruby, Tcl, Lua

The four languages, namely Perl, Python, Tcl and Ruby rose to prominence in the 90s. They are considered as high level languages suited for a range of tasks like application development, system programming, networking and scripting routine tasks. These languages have rich third party library support which are mostly opensource.

These five languages are the most actively supported by the opensource software community and are considered as the computer languages of the future.

Answer: Fortran

Python has borrowed features from other languages. It borrows its class syntax from C++, function/functional programming idioms and lambda syntax from CLISP, and object orientation concepts from Java. But as far as I know, it has not borrowed any features from Fortran!

Answer: Jython

Python has two popular implementations, one that uses C and another that uses Java. The former is known as CPython (or just "Python", since it is the most popular) and the latter is called as Jython or JPython.

Answer: comp.lang.python, comp.lang.python.announce

Usenet archives computer language groups in its comp.lang newsgroup.
Python has two groups in this, comp.lang.python for questions on the language and comp.lang.python.announce for announcements of new programs, language features, products or events.