Question: When was a widely used high-level programming language for general-purpose programming, created by the "Benevolent Dictator For Life", first released?

Context paragraphs:
John Backus: John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist.  He directed the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Backus–Naur form (BNF), a widely used notation to define formal language syntax.  He later did research into the function-level programming paradigm, presenting his findings in his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"

Gosu (programming language): Gosu is a statically-typed programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine released under the Apache 2.  This general-purpose programming language is used in several open-source software projects including SparkGS and Ragnar DB among several others, and is widely used in the insurance industry via Guidewire Software's commercial products.  The language borrows from several existing languages including Java, C#, and ECMAScript.  A notable and unique feature is its Open Type System, which allows the language to be easily extended to provide compile-time checking and IDE awareness of information that is typically checked only at runtime in most other languages.  Also of note is the language's ability to serve as both a full-featured general purpose language and as a concise scripting language.  For instance, Gosu has free-form Program types (. gsp files) for scripting as well as statically verified Template files (. gst files).  Gosu can optionally execute these and all other types directly from source without precompilation, which also distinguishes it from other static languages.

High-level programming language: In computer science, a high-level programming language is a programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer.  In comparison to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language elements, be easier to use, or may automate (or even hide entirely) significant areas of computing systems (e.g. memory management), making the process of developing a program simpler and more understandable relative to a lower-level language.  The amount of abstraction provided defines how "high-level" a programming language is.

Clojure: Clojure ( , like "closure") is a dialect of the Lisp programming language.  Clojure is a general-purpose programming language with an emphasis on functional programming.  It runs on the Java virtual machine and the Common Language Runtime.  Like other Lisps, Clojure treats code as data and has a macro system.  The current development process is community-driven, overseen by Rich Hickey as its benevolent dictator for life (BDFL).

Guido van Rossum: Guido van Rossum (] , born 31 January 1956) is a Dutch programmer who is best known as the author of the Python programming language.  In the Python community, van Rossum is known as a "Benevolent Dictator For Life" (BDFL), meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary.  He was employed by Google from 2005 until December 7th 2012, where he spent half his time developing the Python language.  In January 2013, van Rossum started working for Dropbox.

Python (programming language): Python is a widely used high-level programming language for general-purpose programming, created by Guido van Rossum and first released in 1991.  An interpreted language, Python has a design philosophy that emphasizes code readability (notably using whitespace indentation to delimit code blocks rather than curly brackets or keywords), and a syntax that allows programmers to express concepts in fewer lines of code than might be used in languages such as C++ or Java.  The language provides constructs intended to enable writing clear programs on both a small and large scale.

Xtend: Xtend is a general-purpose high-level programming language for the Java Virtual Machine.  Syntactically and semantically Xtend has its roots in the Java programming language but focuses on a more concise syntax and some additional functionality such as type inference, extension methods, and operator overloading.  Being primarily an object-oriented language, it also integrates features known from functional programming, e.g. lambda expressions.  Xtend is statically typed and uses Java's type system without modifications.  It is compiled to Java code and thereby seamlessly integrates with all existing Java libraries.

Axum (programming language): Axum (previously codenamed Maestro) is a domain-specific concurrent programming language, based on the Actor model, that was under active development by Microsoft between 2009 and 2011.  It is an object-oriented language based on the . NET Common Language Runtime using a C-like syntax which, being a domain-specific language, is intended for development of portions of a software application that is well-suited to concurrency.  But it contains enough general-purpose constructs that one need not switch to a general-purpose programming language (like C#) for the sequential parts of the concurrent components.

General-purpose programming language: In computer software, a general-purpose programming language is a programming language designed to be used for writing software in a wide variety of application domains (a general-purpose language).  In many ways a general-purpose language only has this status because it does not include language constructs designed to be used within a specific application domain (e.g., a page description language contains constructs intended to make it easier to write programs that control the layout of text and graphics on a page).

Handel-C: Handel-C is a high-level programming language which targets low-level hardware, most commonly used in the programming of FPGAs.  It is a rich subset of C, with non-standard extensions to control hardware instantiation with an emphasis on parallelism.  Handel-C is to hardware design what the first high-level programming languages were to programming CPUs.  Unlike many other design languages that target a specific architecture Handel-C can be compiled to a number of design languages and then synthesised to the corresponding hardware.  This frees developers to concentrate on the programming task at hand rather than the idiosyncrasies of a specific design language and architecture.

Supporting paragraphs: Python (programming language) Guido van Rossum
Answer: 1991