Python was invented by Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum in the late 1980s, and started to become popular around the turn of the century.  Contrary to popular belief, he named the language Python not for the snakes, but for Monty Python, a comedy troupe.

Python is free and open source. You don't need to buy it to use it, and the source code for the Python program itself is freely available.

The language is administered by the nonprofit Python Software Foundation, and many of the people who improve it are private citizens who volunteer their time to do so. Python isn't owned by any company, although several leading companies support its development by letting employees work to improve it on company time, and Guido van Rossum worked for a number of years for Google, spending half of his time developing the language.

The number of Python users around the world is estimated to be roughly one million.

Python is used by Intel, IBM, NASA, Pixar, JP Morgan Chase, and a number of other major companies. It is one of the four main languages at Google (along with C++, Java, and Go). Google's YouTube is largely written in Python. So are Reddit, Pinterest, and Instagram. The original BitTorrent client was written in Python. It is used as a scripting language to control Maya, the industry standard 3D modeling and animation tool.

Python is used heavily in academic research, particularly in bioinformatics, biology, and mathematics. It is the standard introductory language for many university computer science programs.