Some systems spring fully-conceived from a theoretical backing – Lisp is pretty much just a working out of John McCarthy's 1960 paper, Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I.

IPython is not such a system. In 2001, Fernando Perez was a graduate student at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He was not a computer science major, he was a physics graduate student who needed to program and wanted a better tool. As a physicist, his idea of "better" was different from what a computer scientist might have envisioned. In particular, the formative influences on the young IPython was tools designed primarily for data analysis and presentation: Mathematica (http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/) and Sage (http://www.sagemath.org/).

Perez has stated that IPython is "meant to be a highly configurable tool for building problem-specific interactive environments," which provides a key to its history and future directions.

Initial efforts came at the...