I used to love Python, back when it was basically just an alternative to perl for scripting. Now it strikes fear into my heart when I encounter something largish written in Python because it usually means "super slow bloated researchy untyped ai/math code that's a nightmare to work with"
Nice watch !
Just wanted to say thank you to those people. They cared enough about it to make it what it is today. An incredibly versatile and powerful, yet simple to understand, language.
I remember when an old school C++ guy from a company I worked for showed up at my desk, he had a csv file he output for some complicated case of latencies issues to analyze (that was like ~10 years ago), and he got a glimpse of what a Jupyter notebook / pandas / plotting lib can do. After 15 mins, when we got a clear understanding of what was going on, his face expression was like 'what the hell did just happen ?'. Felt like magic. Still do !
History of women in the Python world: In 2006, the first two women were voted in as PSF fellows, Laura Creighton and Anna Martelli Ravenscroft. In 2008, there were two women on the PSF board, Gloria Willadsen and Allison Randal. The woman mentored by Guido was Emily Morehouse-Valcarcel. She is now on the steering committee but was not featured in the film. Less prominent in the documentary was Carol Willing who was on the initial steering committee. Also featured were Mariatta Wijaya and Lisa Roach-Carrier who were mentored by another developer.
One fateful spring day in 2000/2001? I read the Python tutorial. It was so good I never wrote a single new line of Perl after that, nor Java for about twenty years (when I brushed up because of needing a job).
Reading all the complaints about it recently is a bit surreal. Newer developers can't program without IDEs and "type systems." Packaging was kind of a mess, but feel like uv solved it. Neither issue really affected me, I used setup.py almost exclusively until moving to uv maybe six months ago.
It was always a glue/prototyping language—if you're using it for kernel drivers or multi-threaded Fibonacci servers or worse, that bad decision is yours (or that of your boss). ;-)
Really enjoyed this and Python is basically what saved my software career.
Education system in Lithuania had turbo pascal in high-school and mostly java and c/c++ in university and while I really loved pascal in high-school the switch to Java was so jarring - "people really enjoy this? maybe I should do something else" is what I thought during my first year of college. Luckily Python started to become really big online and was such a joy to use and be a part of the community it really cleared up this notion that programming sucks. To this day this experience has stuck to me when approaching any new activity - is there a Python here somewhere that would unsuck this?
I'm quite a polyglot these days and will write Java if needed but Python is still my daily driver and it just feels right. If I'm doing something 10 hours a day, I'd like to feel good while doing it and that's exactly what Python delivers.
Is MartelliBot featured? Alex Martelli did sooo much for the success of python in the early days.
He was patient, informative and above all extremely thoughtful in his stackoverflow responses. He was also very generous with his talks, all of which added to the rich ecosystem Python had back in the day.
Related:
Interview: Guido van Rossum Revisits Python’s Life in a New Documentary
https://thenewstack.io/guido-van-rossum-revisits-pythons-lif...
1 hour and 24 minutes of python history, love it!
It's good to have another record of history while most of the key participants are alive.
As someone who enjoys Python, I do wonder where Python will be in 10 years. I felt Guido's abdication came about due to fundamental challenges in the language (i.e., it's un-specifiable), which then were submerged by orthogonal, early 2020's social politics. I think some of the challenges have been addressed piecemeal (performance), but I worry that decisions makers may be losing their holistic understanding of the language.
God bless the Go guys for not doing a Python 2 to 3 fiasco
I remember learning it in college. How easy it was to pull and parse a webpage and allow me to store and study the world’s information. I was hooked.
The launch of the documentary was followed up by a live Q&A session at EuroPython: https://youtu.be/Sf2AqQ5a38Y?si=BbJywWDCMZPgjhlN
I am surprised that the walrus operator had to do with Guido's resignation. The walrus operator is awesome. There are so many cases you need a temporary variable in a control flow. The walrus is a beautiful way to handle it.
For better or worse, I find Python beautiful. And here's an easter egg for everyone (it comes up in the Documentary too):
import this
Can update the URL to the doc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfH4QL4VqJ0
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45056377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45050548)
I can’t wait to see it.
I was big into Python for over a decade of my career. I spoke at Pycon US and Canada. Wrote a few libraries. It had a great community.
I’ll always be grateful for it.
Here's another article with some comments from the new documentary's director - and from unsung Python hero Paul Everitt. (Everitt hired Guido van Rossum and all the other core developers in the late 1990s -- while keeping Python open source, and voting the nonprofit Python Software Foundation into existence.)
https://thenewstack.io/guido-van-rossum-revisits-pythons-lif...
I realize that given the current adoption, the language might turn out to be completely different in the next few years.
And right now, transformers literally can transform any source to any target, so languages are not as valuable as they once used to be and any idioms in one language will eventually become outmoded thanks to the rapidly evolving way we work today.
Python will still be a favorite language for me, just not as much as it used to be.
If someone makes a new modern, tiny, self contained runtime (Bun like) for Python deployments, hit me up. I'll be happy to try it. That's something I've been wanting for a while.
Of course, languages always have their pivotal moment when they become a factor widely adopted in the whole world.
I cannot say for the back and general usage, but at least for AI/ML definitely that moment happened between 2014 and 2016 when Theano, Caffe, and later 2015/16 Tensorflow cemented Python as the default for ML applications.
Watching Python's rise has been a little wild. At first it was neck to neck with Perl and with Ruby after that. But then again nobody really expected AI to be this wildly popular.
Interesting and enjoyable documentary. Thanks to the CultRepo team for putting it out there!
Url changed from https://lwn.net/Articles/1035537/, which points to this.
> most beloved programming language
Citation needed
> world's most beloved programming language
The more I use python, the more I hate it. For the inconsistencies and the short comings and the stuff it glosses over and absurdities like having the default queue be thread safe (sacrificing performance). My personal opinion is it is a garbage language.
Ugh, but why is the video so dark?!
Python got big by impeccable marketing and this is the logical continuation. Several people in the video are raging bureaucrats who haven't done much apart from talking. Steering Council members who canceled and libeled Tim Peters are in that video.
Python has always suffered from the overrepresentation of talkers, and the recent draconian "leadership" that consists of the worst people have driven most developers away apart from some failing corporate projects.
This video tries to revive the spirit that existed in 2000 before many of those developers sold out Python to corporations and turned utterly evil.
The Zen of Python part was quite fun. I wish Tim Peters was in it though. He wrote yesterday:
> I do show up, but not “live”. For various reasons (mostly related to declining health), I didn’t actively participate. I gave the director (Ida Bechtle) a pile of source material at the start, and that was the last of my involvement. She spliced in some recycled video of an interview I did with the PyPy folks at a PyCon some years ago, but I’m there mostly so people could recite my so-called “Zen of Python”, which an actual historian (Joseph Dragovich) assured me is “the most famous values statement for any programming language community”. https://discuss.python.org/t/python-documentary-going-live-t...