For its Octoverse event, GitHub recorded an interview with Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python. From it we learn about the origins of Python and its name and its role in the age of AI.

As we reported in State of the Octoverse 2025, as of August 2025, TypeScript is the most-used language on GitHub, overtaking Python and relegating it to second place.

However, according to GitHub's data, Python still grew 49% year over year in 2025, and remains the default language of AI, science, and education for developers across the world. This new information served as the starting point for this video, Why Python is the language of AI, in which Guido van Rossum looks both backwards and forwards, commenting both on Python's evolution and its future impact on AI development. 

Explaining Python's origins, Guido says:

I created Python because I needed a language that was easier to use than C, and in the context, the only alternative was shell scripts, which was totally inadequate for what I wanted to do. I wanted something that was much safer than C, that took care of memory allocation and all sorts of out-of-bounds indexing, but was still a sort of an actual programming language.

As to the name of the language:

I was a big fan of Monty Python and I thought that the existing sort of patterns for naming languages—like acronyms or famous people or even mythology—were boring. I wanted to counteract that as a tiny act of rebellion with something from pop culture. Plus, Python is a six-letter word, it's pretty easy to type, it's very easy to remember because it has all these other connotations of snakes and comedy.

While he has been taken by surprise by Python's importance in AI, Guido mentions two reasons. One is that developers working in the area started on in Machine Learning and therefore were familar with Python. The other is the way Python is a very human-friendly, which means that it will continue to be important:

The role of Python in a world where AI is even more ubiquitous as it is today: you still need to write code, and Python is still a fantastic tool to write code. And because Python is very human friendly, that almost automatically makes it also AI friendly, because the same brain cells that help us interpret human language and generate human language also help us understand programming languages. 

What I find most surprising is that Python is a language that does not follow the model set by the other popular languages. Java, C++ and C# all make use of the same class-based, object-oriented approach with brakets and semicolons. They are essentially similar takes on the same idea. Python does it differently and it makes a for a better fit with AI.

• Mike James is the author of the trilogy Programmer's Python: Something Completely Different which explore what makes Python a unique and versatile language.

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Python Supreme In Era Of AI