Python Version History

Python Software Foundation (PSF) used to support two major versions, Python 2.x & Python 3.x. PSF supported Python 2 because a large body of existing code could not be forward ported to Python 3. So, they supported Python 2 until January 2020, but now they have stopped supporting it.

Python 3.0 was released on December 3rd, 2008. It was designed to rectify certain flaws in the earlier version. This version is not completely backward-compatible with previous versions. However, many of its major features have since been back-ported to the Python 2.6.x and 2.7.x version series. Releases of Python 3 include utilities to facilitate the automation of Python 2 code translation to Python 3.

The following table lists all the important versions of Python:

Version	Release Date	Important Features
Python 0.9.0	February 1991	Classes with inheritance exception handling Functions Modules
Python 1.0	January 1994	Functional programming tools (lambda, map, filter and reduce). Support for complex numbers. Functions with keyword arguments
Python 2.0	October 2000	List comprehension. Cycle-detecting garbage collector. Support for Unicode. Unification of data types and classes
Python 2.7.0 - EOL - Jan 2020	July 2010
Python 3	December 2008	Backward incompatible. print keyword changed to print() function raw_input() function depreciated Unified str/Unicode types. Utilities for automatic conversion of Pytthon 2.x code
Python 3.6	December 2016
Python 3.6.5	March 2018
Python 3.7.0	May 2018	New C API for thread-local storage Built-in breakpoint() Data classes Context variables More..
Python 3.8	October 2019	Assignment Expression Positional-only parameters Parallel filesystem cache for compiled bytecode files More..
Python 3.9 - Current Version	October 2020	Dictionary Merge & Update Operators New removeprefix() and removesuffix() string methods Builtin Generic Types More..