A popular, object-oriented scripting language used for writing system utilities and Internet scripts. It is also used as a glue language for integrating components in C and C++. Created by Guido van Rossum in Amsterdam in the early 1990s, it was named after the BBC comedy series "Monty Python's Flying Circus." Python is an interpreted language that compiles to bytecode and requires a "virtual machine" for runtime execution. It uses elements from C, C++ and Modula and supports interfaces to popular functions and libraries such as Unix sockets, the Tk GUI library, Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) and X11.