---
title: "Which came first, Python or the World Wide Web?"
description: "Python vs the World Wide Web: the World Wide Web came first, by 2 years — 1989 against 1991. What happened in each case."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/python-vs-world-wide-web/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Python or the World Wide Web?

**Which came first, Python or the World Wide Web?: the World Wide Web**

1989 — 2 years before Python

the World Wide Web came first, by 2 years. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the proposal at CERN.

## Side by side

|  | Python | the World Wide Web |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1991 | 1989 |
| Date | 1991-02-20 | — |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Guido van Rossum released version 0.9.0 publicly. | Tim Berners-Lee wrote the proposal at CERN. |

## Python

Python was started as a hobby project over Christmas 1989 and first released publicly in February 1991 — four years before Java, JavaScript, PHP and Ruby, all of which arrived in 1995. Most people assume it is much newer because its popularity arrived twenty years after it did. It is named after Monty Python, not the snake.

## the World Wide Web

Berners-Lee circulated his proposal in March 1989, built the first browser and server by the end of 1990, and CERN put the software into the public domain in 1993. The Web is twenty years younger than the internet: the internet is the network, the Web is one service running on it, and email and file transfer both predate the Web by decades. The first website went live in December 1990 and is still online.

## Common questions

### Which came first, Python or the World Wide Web?

the World Wide Web, by 2 years — 1989 against 1991.

### When did Python start?

1991. Guido van Rossum released version 0.9.0 publicly.

### When did the World Wide Web start?

1989. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the proposal at CERN.

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## Sources

- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]