Packt Publishing; 2014. — 190 p. — ISBN: 9781783988341Scientists, engineers, and programmers were quick to address this issue. Hardware costs decreased as performance went up, and there was a great push to develop scripting languages that allowed integration of disparate libraries through multiple platforms. It was in this environment that Python was being developed in the late 1980s, under the leadership of Guido Van Rossum. From the beginning, Python was designed to be a cutting-edge, high-level computer language with a simple enough structure that its basics could be quickly learned even by programmers who are not experts.
One of Python's attractive features for rapid development was its interactive shell, through which programmers could experiment with concepts interactively before including them in scripts. However, the original Python shell had a limited set of features and better interactivity was necessary. Starting from 2001, Fernando Perez started developing IPython, an improved interactive Python shell designed specifically for scientific computing.
