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Python: The Documentary | An origin story

Key Points

Python originated in Amsterdam in the 80s at CWI, building on the ABC project designed to make programming accessible to non-programmers and artists
Guido van Rossum created Python during Christmas 1989 as a hobby project to bridge the gap between C and shell scripting
Python borrowed ABC's indentation for statement grouping but dropped features Guido didn't like, creating a more practical language
The language was named after Monty Python's Flying Circus, establishing a culture of humor and community from the beginning
Python's early success came from being the first real interactive systems programming language that was readable and fun to use
The 1994 workshop at NIST marked the beginning of the Python community, bringing together 20 enthusiasts who shaped the language's direction
Guido became the "Benevolent Dictator for Life" (BDFL), providing stable leadership and final decision-making authority for decades
Python's open-source nature and easy installation made it attractive compared to expensive proprietary alternatives like MATLAB
The scientific community adopted Python heavily, with NumPy, SciPy, and pandas becoming foundational tools for data analysis
Companies like Dropbox proved Python could scale to production systems serving millions of users, changing perceptions about its capabilities
The Python 2 to Python 3 transition was painful and took over a decade, teaching important lessons about backward compatibility
The community successfully addressed diversity issues, growing female speaker representation from 1% to 40% at PyCon conferences
Mariatta became the first woman Python core developer through Guido's active mentorship program
The rise of data science, machine learning, and AI positioned Python as the dominant language for these critical fields
Major ML frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch chose Python APIs, cementing its role in the AI revolution
Guido resigned as BDFL in 2018 over the controversial "walrus operator" debate, leading to the creation of a 5-person steering council
Python evolved from a hobby project to one of the world's most popular programming languages, used everywhere from kindergarten education to Mars rovers
The language succeeded by prioritizing readability, community, and accessibility, making programming approachable to scientists, artists, and non-traditional programmers
Full Transcript

Language: en
Did you think Python was going to get
popular from the beginning or
Python has contributed to making
critical thinking a little more
approachable by more people. You can
spend one to two hours learning
programming fundamentals and then you
can write like 10 to 20 lines of code
that do something interesting.
The language, the community, the
ecosystem, the market, the whole thing
has had such an impact on humanity
today. I think it's safe to say that
almost anywhere there's a computer,
there's probably some Python.
It's literally on Mars.
The impact of AI, I think we're still
seeing what that's going to be. Python
is incredibly important for that.
To fully understand how Python got so
big, we have to go back in time.
Maybe not that far back.
Everything started back in Amsterdam in
the 80s during my time at CWI, a Dutch
research facility.
The CWI had been behind a lot of major
programming language developments. Algo
60 and Algo 68 for instance and Lombbe
Mutton had tried teaching programming to
artists and discovered things about
programming that are easy if you're a
scientist or a geek. But for somebody
like an artist, those things weren't
obvious because you had to know
something about the computer.
The cause of the frustration was the low
level of the languages that were
available. The computers were immensely
expensive and compared with that a
programmer was really really cheap and
so programming languages were designed
with that economic relationship in mind.
It didn't matter if it took a long time
to program as long as it didn't demand
too much of the computer because that's
where the cost was.
We looked at each other and said, can't
we do a better job? Can't we design a
language that is easy to learn, easy to
teach, but also easy to use
so that beginners could understand how
to program without having to go into all
those messy hardware details.
And that's how the ABC project was born.
One of the members of the team waso.
I was hired to work on ABC for which
there was a small prototype but every
part of the prototype had to be expanded
to a fully working according to the
In 1985, we made the release of ABC.
And then we hit the problem. How to make
the world know that there was ABC. We
did not have a good way of reaching our
intended audience. The internet did not
exist. Most people had never heard of a
computer or even seen one. If anybody
wanted a copy, they had to send us a
letter and we'd send them a floppy disc.
So I'm afraid ABC reached very few
people and at some point the directors
for reason that I still don't understand
killed that project.
I had spent well 3 and 1/2 years of of
hard work on this this language and the
implementation to make it as as good as
we could. So it was disappointing.
was transferred to another project on a
distributed operating system, the amoeba
One of my jobs at that project as the
programmer, not the researcher, was to
write or help write a large number of
user applications. And I didn't actually
think that for many of those utilities
C was a very good language.
And I thought, well, oh man, if we just
could program ABC instead of C, each of
those utilities would be like half a
page of code and I could write the
entire suite of utilities in a couple of
weeks instead of the years that it
looked like it was going to take us.
except that ABC was so high and
abstract. It wasn't a good language to
talk to servers and file systems and
processes and it sort of the whole
operating system thing was abstracted
away from ABC. So I thought, well, there
really ought to be a language that sort
of bridges the gap between C and shell.
And we looked at Pearl and we didn't
think it was any good as a programming
It was about as bad as as basic,
although in different ways. So, Python
was also in a part built as an
alternative to Pearl. That's where I
decided, oh well, I'm going to see if I
can make my own programming language.
One Christmas holiday, I believe, he
decided to spend his time designing and
building a new programming language for
the operating system based on the
principles that he'd learned while on
the ABC project. It was logical that
they would start with ABC as as an
example. The most prominent feature that
Python borrowed from ABC is actually the
use of indentation
for statement grouping. But it was also
logical that I sort of dropped the
things from ABC that I didn't
particularly like. That's how we ended
up with Python.
I finally was confident enough of the
interpreter was complete enough that I
showed it to Lombair. He showed me a
language he had developed stealthily
which he called Python named after Monty
I said look what I made.
It was clear to me that it had some
resemblance to ABC.
The command line prompt is even the
same. So Lombair watched me type a few
things and
was excited about it and he apparently
thought I would be excited as well. At
some point he had seen enough and he
said, "Can I try something?" And he
types one very short line of code and it
crashes the interpreter
and he knew that that it would.
The point escaped me. I didn't know why
he thought this was better than ABC and
why he had done this whole project.
I went back and the next day I had a fix
for it. But it was a pretty crushing
experience to be honest.
It must have been at least half a year
later that I first got acquainted with
Python. So this is the office where
Guido and I were holed up when uh he
created Python.
There were two important users. Short
was one of them and the other was
Gita was sitting over there and I was
sitting over there. If you want to
prototype a program, you sort of write
uh the uh the outlines uh of the
program, but it doesn't actually work.
When you do this in Python, it actually
works. It's readable. It's very easy to
program and the indentation is totally
natural as far as I'm concerned. Anyway,
short and Jack were the most active in
using Python.
You find bugs, you find the things that
you want to extend
and then telling me about it because all
they had to do was say, "Hey, Kredo." It
was the first real interactive uh uh
systems programming language. So, you
could just sit and write and run it
immediately without any compilation. So,
it was much more fun to use than the old
programming languages, but slower.
I think it was mostly Jack's idea in the
end while we all worked on it to make an
open-source release.
CDBI allowed Guido to distribute Python
to the world as long as this copyright
notice was there.
They would have held back if they had
known it would be such an incredible
success, which is good that they didn't
know. Nobody knew. I didn't either.
Because if they had held back, it would
never have become an incredible success.
Then we had to actually physically do
the release which turned out to be an
incredible pain because Usenet was the
only thing we had to release it.
Usenet was a network of you could say
bulletin boards. People would write
messages. They would get distributed
over the world and then there were the
groups for all the different computer
languages.
Usenit had a very strict limit on the
size of a single post. First put your
entire source tree in a tar ball. Then
compress it and you have to do another
step where you turn the binary data into
ASI encoding.
So you have this huge file with
gobblygook, but it's at least printable
gobble gobblygook. And then you apply
another tool that snips it into pieces.
Then there is a script where if you have
downloaded all 21 parts, you can undo
all those operations in reverse. That
was what people put up with. So we did
all the work on our side and plenty of
people did all the work on their side to
unpack this because I had apparently
written a very good teaser about what
this was.
Very quickly I started getting feedback
via email or US next from people who had
done something exciting with it or who
had found a bug and that just kept
We worked at Johnson Space Center. So
our interest was putting together uh
flight simulations and tools for the
design engineers that would be used for
a shuttle program at the time.
I remember needing a scripting language
to control a a C++ library project we
were working on at the time.
Not too long into that search, I I found
Guido's Python distribution at CWI. I
was able to FTP that down,
unpack it, compile it, and run it in a
matter of 10 minutes or so. That was my
first impressive uh experience with with
20 years ago, a computer that cost a
million dollars and filled an entire
room had less capability than an 11PB
desktop computer today. With costs going
down and capabilities going up, the
computer has entered our lives quickly
and unobtrusively.
There were lots of things changing in a
major way that made computing
particularly exciting to be in. At that
time, computers suddenly were coming out
of the machine room and landing up on
your desk. And then of course the web
happened. Then it all exploded.
After the internet uh came to Europe, it
was much easier for software to be
distributed. Python very slowly took
off. Then there was a growing Python
community which was very supportive like
a big family you could almost say.
Part of the benefit of this is that I I
don't I'm like there's no strain on my
body at all. I was working on developing
a kind of distributed equipment database
and a colleague at the lab, Michael
Mcclelay, knew that I was looking for a
what was called a scripting language
that was also sophisticated that would
enable you to build substantial things
and not get bogged down in the ragged
Scripting languages were designed to
glue things together, to connect things
that already worked, that already
existed. Immediately on trying it, I was
just amazed and thought this can't be as
good as it is. And it was.
Mike was interested in bringing Guido
over and Guido was interested in coming
99% of the people that I got in touch
with were in the United States. So Guido
ended up coming and then Mike and Guido
and I wanted to arrange a workshop so
people who were interested in Python
could gather and talk about what they
were working on and what they felt was
This is the t-shirt for the first
conference. And so this
yeah that that was just sort of flowy
writing and on the on the back
it gave the the date of the conference.
Spum, spum, spum, spum. It's such a
fantastic song.
That workshop really is for me the
beginning of the Python community.
November 1994, Gaithersburg, Maryland in
this windowless government office
building at NIST.
That was a great experience. It was
about two days. We had 20 people. I
still have the t-shirt from that
There was just kind of this feel of,
hey, there's something happening. This
will be fun to hang out with the people
that I chat with online
to actually see Guido in person and
actually make decisions. And we knew
that if you impressed him with the
feature and it was an easy thing to
install, he would add it to the language
right there so that we can at least try
it out in beta form.
There was like a whole room of people
who knew what you were talking about
because they had all studied Python
deeply or almost all.
One of the people was Barry Warsaw.
Around 1994, I joined a company, CNRI,
Corporation for National Research
Initiatives, and we were building these
software agents, little programs that
can move around to different computers
on a network, and they pickle themselves
up and move around to another place and
reconstitute themselves and do some more
work. A friend of mine from NIST sent me
an email and said, "Hey, we've got this
guy coming over from the Netherlands and
he's going to talk about his language.
Do you want to come?" And so we went to
the workshop and just absolutely fell in
love with of course Python and of course
Guido. Even then, it had the feeling
that there was a there there was
something that was going to happen that
there was potential. I remember coming
back to see an Orion saying, "Oh, this
is great. we're going to use Python for
sure in our project. And one of our
colleagues at CNRI said, "Well, what do
you think? Why don't we just hire Guido?
CNR was set up to sort of promote
information infrastructure and foster
research, help build pilot projects,
take the results and put them out into
the public so that others could then
leverage it. Part of CNRI's mission was
to cultivate internetbased things.
That's why our name Corporation for
National Research Initiatives has the
word initiatives in there.
We had a need for a language that would
be easier for people to deal with than
any other traditional languages that
were around at the time.
I ran across a photograph. There was a
party at scenario years ago. It was
probably I think 1996.
And it's it's a
Yeah. I used to say Gito. Many people
say Guido, but I said G. and I'm sure I
don't pronounce it right. Oh, he was a
very stylish person and he was a very
strong fellow.
Got introduced to him and it just seemed
like it was a good fit and so I made the
job offer.
For me, it was fantastic.
There is no doubt about that.
One of the things he insists on if you
want to get him to work for you is that
he has some fraction of his time,
preferably as much as halfime if not
more, to work on the language itself.
the fact that they could work full-time
on Python because it turned out that the
the Nobots project was almost more an
excuse to to hire me than I did much for
that. I kind of feel like our work on
Python was a little subversive. You
know, we tended to spend a lot more time
on Python than maybe we should have. I
went to CNRI and since I had been a
systems person, I was responsible for
setting up python.org. We should have
also grabbed python.com even though we
didn't think of Python as a commercial
enterprise because someone else got it
and uh used it to host a stupid porn
site. For years we had to warn people go
to python.org not.com.
It really was the perfect home I think
for doing all of that early Python
development and develop a lot of the
infrastructure around Python. We had a
meeting discussing making some kind of
user group or software organization
where the Python software activity was
We need a little bit of governance, a
little bit of organization, but we don't
want too much because I don't think any
of us really liked bureaucracy.
And then the question came up about what
we should call Guido as part of that. I
think it was me who suggested that Guido
be called the benevolent dictator and
then Barry suggested benevolent dictator
for life and that became an internet
meme or actually a software meme.
Benevolent dictator for life was you can
find it on Wikipedia.
Ultimately, you know, Guido was the
inventor of the language and the final
decider about yes, this is going to make
it in or this is not going to make it
in. I think I developed my own style
during those first years. All ideas are
welcome, but I will choose which ideas I
believe are right to add to the
language. There's
dozens and dozens of aspects of Python
today where somebody had a vision for if
you just add this to Python, look at all
these amazing things that I can do.
I'm one of the many people that came to
Python, not as a programmer, but as a
scientist. Python wasn't the first
language I used for science. I was doing
satellite data processing and I used
Pearl to do it and then a year later I
would come back and try to figure out
what I'd done and I had no idea. Python
had the opposite experience. I first
started using Python in 1997. I just
used it to do some scripting, do some
data processing with some medical
imaging data and I was like this is
nice. This is pretty cool. A year later,
so 1998, I came back to look at the code
I'd written and I could read it. I
understood what I did. And that was kind
of for me the convincing data that said,
"Oh, I need to dig in on this language."
And there were a few really key people
at that time who were publishing or
talking about how to use Python for
science. Not very many, but a few.
Conrad Henson was one of them, I
remember, and David Asher and Jim Hugan.
There's been a number of uh stages in
the life cycle of Python when it just
grew from a a core language capability
to a platform with a number of different
specialty modules and packages that made
it very very useful for certain uh user
communities. The first one was probably
the numeric community, the science and
engineering folks that wanted high
performance matrix operations to be
done. Even though Guido wasn't a
scientist himself, wasn't necessarily
deeply concerned with the same things
that we were concerned with as
scientists, he was open to the
suggestions.
I think one of the things that people
don't appreciate about the Python
language as much now that it's so
popular and mainstream is how important
it was that Guido was uh open to new
ideas and open to the needs of people
who are not traditional programmers.
I think he had a very cleareyed quiet
focus on understanding some things about
the future
uh that he built into the language. It
was uniquely suited to its environment.
One of the reasons I used Python and I
think a lot of people use Python at the
time is that in the early 2000s the
world was almost divided into here's an
open source ecosystem or you can go and
use Java which is actually a paid thing.
I was using mat lab. I really didn't
like the fact that when I wrote code and
I wanted to share that code with others,
I was essentially telling people they
had to go buy a license for a software
package before they could even look at
my or use my code.
You know, these are the days where you
have to like buy the developer tools or
spend a couple hundred bucks to get
Visual Studio 6.0 and then Python and
then all of these libraries were open
source and then could be adapt could be
used in a commercial project. I was sort
of early on convinced by community
members that Python being open- source
and the particular way it was open
source was very important so that people
would feel comfortable using Python to
make great things that they would then
be able to to sell.
In 98, Blender was published on the
internet. The software was free and then
you could buy some things around it. We
were uh restricted to use open source.
So, you didn't have a lot of options. We
were doing a call on our website like
what is the most popular scripting
language that we should add in Blender.
Pearl was really big and Python was up
upcoming and there were some others and
it was interesting to see that everybody
who was advising us to use Pearl as
scripting language but they only
advertised how great Pearl is. And the
people who came more from the Python
background who said well I think Python
is a better choice. They came with a
balanced opinion. And they said okay
pearl will give you this and this and
this and Python will give you other
things and balancing all of it I would
recommend you to do Python and only for
that reason I picked Python just because
the people were nicer.
It was honestly just a lot of
enthusiasts. It was a lot of people who
just enjoyed the language, enjoyed the
people involved with the language and it
would just happen to be typically
motivating enough for people to want to
help out.
Ultimately, there's a sense of fun that
comes across and Guido coded that into
the name of the language influenced by
Monty Monty Python.
It creates a sense of community to have
your little jokes.
Tim Peters is a famous early example and
blending both like the the aesthetics of
Python and humor.
Tim Peters was this mythical feature
creature in the world of Python and no
one had met him.
He was out there in the ether as a wise
one to give us advice on what to do with
numerical processing.
Steve Majeski sent me some email telling
me about Python. So I started a email
correspondence with Wido about the
language and about the design and I got
some of the pre-release code and played
with it and talked to him about design
decisions and liked it very much.
Tim Peters was a Python contributor and
community member and mentor to me from
very early on.
Tim was a channeler of Guido. He had a
really unique way of saying I think
Guido's going to like this or I don't
think Guido is going to like that.
There's a poem called the Zenopython
which is a partially humorous, partially
serious poem about the the aesthetics of
of Python.
I'm actually looking at the Usenet post
where Tim posted his first version of
the Zen of Python, although he called it
the way of Python.
And it was in response to some
discussion where people were complaining
that they didn't understand what was
Python's philosophy. They couldn't
figure me out. And Tim had figured me
out and he put it basically in poetry.
Here is the way of Python by Tim Peters
from 1999.
Beautiful is better than ugly. Duh.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex. Complex
is better than complicated. And I love
that distinction.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense. Readability
counts. I will say it counts for a lot.
Special cases aren't special enough to
break the rules. Although practicality
beats purity. Errors should never pass
silently unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the
temptation to guess. I did not follow
that in a very key piece of numpai and
it's still a mess.
There should be one and preferably only
one obvious way to do it. That's a
direct reference to Pearl's motto of
there's more than one way to do it. By
the way,
although that may not be obvious at
first, unless you're Dutch,
now is better than never.
Although never is often better than
right now.
If the implementation is hard to
explain, it's a bad idea. That's a
really good one. If the implementation
is easy to explain, it may be a good
idea. Name spaces are one honking great
idea. Let's do more of those. This is so
Normally import this, print, import some
useful library, which is very serious
business. Having an import this that was
just a joke uh was a bit of lightness
that we like to add. This is from a
small hobbyist community, right? Because
if you're a corporate behemoth making a
a programming language, like someone's
probably going to tell you that you
can't put a silly poem in your in your
programming language, but Python's just
made by uh dogs on the internet, so they
can put poems in their software.
The different ways to make money on the
internet are just beginning to emerge.
Entrepreneurs are putting their faith in
a new medium to deliver the big payoff.
is the.com bubble all this money pumping
into Silicon Valley software and
internet stuff. Early 2000 I decided to
leave CRI and with a few co-workers
joined little startup named be open.
While Senorai I think was an amazing
home for Python in the early days and
everything changes and everything
evolves and thinking well if we're going
to strike out on our own this is
probably the right time to do that. That
didn't work out. I'd say within maybe a
year or something. Be open was
completely incompetent. We spent the
summer in blissful ignorance working
full-time on Python. We built and
released Python 2 and within 5 months it
was over. We were paid our salaries
every 2 weeks and then suddenly in late
October we weren't.
It was a moment where the could
have hit the fan if all the Python guys
went their separate ways. Python wasn't
big enough to survive that at the time.
That was when I had a company Digital
Creations that later became Zoe, which
is an application server, database
server, index server, web server, etc.
Very large scale commercial quality
application written in Python.
And if Python died, you know who else
would die? We'd die. The whole platform
was built on Python. So they were Python
We need to go and make sure that Python
is secure for the future and that the
team stays together. So we negotiated an
agreement with them to join my company.
That was an incredibly lucky rescue. We
felt like we really trusted them and we
believed in what they were doing and
what they wanted to do with Python and
for Python. This is a place that I'm
proud of. In hindsight, it was a really
critical point in Python's life. I think
if we had chosen wrong or tried to say,
"Oh, well, we'll just strike out on our
own anyway." You never know. But I'm not
so sure that Python would have survived
that juncture in its life. Yeah.
Python just kept sort of growing and the
community kept self-organizing.
One of the I think underlying themes of
Python, if you take it in its totality,
is this sense of grassroots movements.
Things grow from the bottom up and
evolve to the point where everybody sort
of realizes, oh, we need a little bit
more structure. Oh, the Python Software
Foundation. In my opinion, the PSF, that
damn thing was a success from day one.
That came out of one of the concerns we
had had with B open actually. So CNRI
had written a license for Python and put
his name on it and B open had copied a
version of that license and put the B
open name on it. There was a concern
that at some point I might accidentally
end up working for a company that tried
to grab ownership of Python. We realized
that we really need an organization that
will be independent, will not be
beholden to any company and their whims
and their lawyers and will really keep
Python users
as their f first and foremost customer
so to speak in mind.
And then the magic happened when we got
into Pyon, which is maybe the third
stool of the miracle of Python.
What has been your take away from um
Pyon US this year?
It feels like people are still willing
to go do hard things, work on things
together, you know. Wow. They still do
have the passion to be honest.
So, what was it for you?
Uh, for me most definitely like meeting
people I haven't met in a while.
That's cool.
Yeah. And just pretty much hanging out
with them.
You try to walk
to the other side. There's like 10
people that you want to see in between
like stop. I want to talk to you.
Oh, I know.
Pablo and Yuri presented as bananas
and then Lucash asked the question
dressed as a banana. And then GO came in
just as a banana as well.
Thank you for what you do for the PSF.
Please don't step down. Just keep doing
it forever.
Raise your hand if you love the web.
Just raise your hand.
Raise your hand if you have done React
front ends.
Raise your hand if you would like to
come back.
No, come back to Python.
All right. Good. For the record, 100%. I
begged my mother to take me to uh Pyon
and I met all my online heroes. He was
this distant benevolent dictator for
life uh who I'd been talking to over the
internet, but here he was in person and
so I was thrilled to be able to uh
finally meet him. Then I think everyone
was aware that he was a 15-year-old kid
on the other end of the that terminal.
When PYON was held in Montreal, the
organizer asked me if I'd be willing to
give an opening address to the
conference. Well, I'm a slightly fast
talker and I had some spare time and I
just use it as an opportunity to say
thank you. I like to think of it as I
came for the language, but I stayed for
the community. So, I want to personally
thank all of you for making this such a
wonderful place to be and such a
wonderful group of people to be around.
So, thank you. Luckily, it came off well
cuz people still quote it. I think it
kind of speaks to the core ethos of
Python. We try to develop this tool that
people can use for their needs to get
their work done. But the community is
the true strength of Python. It's not
just the language, right? It's the
It was steadily growing every single
year. was getting more and more
downloads, more and more people uh
making use of it.
It became a more sophisticated language
that was fit the purpose for this new
emerging programming paradigm where the
the web itself is the platform. He told
me an interesting number that that made
me realize that the Python user
community was already much bigger than I
had estimated
because he said, "Guido, you don't know
the sales numbers for Python books, but
I am Tim O'Reilly. I published the two
most important ones and I do know the
sales numbers and they are fantastic."
I don't know if he had that much
enthusiasm in his voice then, but he was
sharing this new to me important fact
which made me realize, oh my gosh,
Python tends to get spikes when certain
specialties, I guess you could say, pick
the language up and decide that this is
a thing that they want to use in their
area. Everybody wanted to to do things
with the worldwide web and Python
actually became a really powerful
platform for for doing not just web
pages but web servers and services
and suddenly we had an increase of
people coming in from the web world.
I think Dropbox was one of the early
companies to start building in Python
and reaching millions of users.
My name's Drew and I'll be showing you a
quick tour of Dropbox, which is a new
way to store and share files online.
Python had been largely viewed as
scripting language you run on the back
end or maybe in an academic setting or
in a scientific setting, but not really
for like production desktop software
that you ship to millions of people. But
I just started writing in Python and
hoping that none of the roadblocks would
completely blow me up. You can develop
programs much faster in Python because
it's a higher level language and it's a
very clean easy language and so we could
we could be a lot more competitive than
other companies who were writing with
Java or C++ or Pearl.
Even back then we were competing against
the Google's and Microsofts of the world
and you know our odds didn't seem very
good. So we needed all the help we can
get. Google had this big team like a
hundred people C++ programmers trying to
do a video hosting site and they could
never keep up with this little thing
over there called YouTube and they went
and looked and it was just a couple of
people writing Python. Python ended up
being a big force multiplier on our
effort and no other language that we
considered had anything close to that
kind of capability.
The fact that data science suddenly
became a thing that you had to do,
combined with the fact that Python was
sort of well positioned to do data
science stuff meant a huge amount of new
Python users flowed in.
What was starting to happen in the 2009
2010 time frame, we were seeing more and
more of our consulting deals tied to
using Python not as really a replacement
for mat lab or engineering type things,
but using Python for doing data
processing. We didn't call it data
science at the time, but it was that
kind of work, right? It was modeling,
predictive analytics, things like that.
This is the time of Hadoop, the time of
big data, the time of Spark, and people
were doing Java at scale. we were
starting to do much more consulting work
in the financial industry and we'd walk
into these these large very well-
capitalized firms and they were using
Python to do business data processing. I
realized okay if it's a research group
over here doing some science research
and they don't have money and they use
an open source thing I get it but if you
have JP Morgan right which has a lot of
money and they're picking up and using
these scientific tools and they're
loving it. I realized that we didn't
just have a cheap free alternative. We
actually had something that was
innovative and that was doing something
fairly unique.
Peter and I ended up leaving and thought
and uh starting another company. We
started as continum Analytics actually
and its vision was to scale NumPy and
pandas to large data sets and large
We quickly ran into a simple problem
very quickly in
but a very annoying problem.
Yes. people just couldn't even install
the software needed to run all this
Python stuff.
The thing about the Python scientific
and data stack is that all of these
different libraries, they're very
different than the web development
libraries because these data libraries
are often backed by a very large amount
of complex C++ for other kinds of
software modules. And to build those
correctly takes some work to build them
correctly on every operating system
takes even more work. And then to build
them so that they can actually be
connected together that requires you to
have this entire build system
rationalized.
And so the very first thing we did was
like make a distribution of Python to
make it easy to get that installed.
A lot of the data science Python people,
they didn't even use normal Python. They
used this Anaconda Python distribution.
Sort of a dumb joke that I came up with
at one point. It was basically Python
for big data. So it's a big snake. So
After like a few years, we we kept going
to conferences and going to places and
people wouldn't know who we were. But
the instant that we mentioned that we
make Anaconda, they would say, "Oh,
yeah, of course. I love Anaconda. I use
it all the time." Right? So, after that
happened like the thousandth time, we
said, "Okay, maybe we should rename the
company Anaconda."
Data um engineering became a discipline
where Python was incredibly entrenched.
It was Python and R. And over time,
Python's data analysis libraries caught
up and plotting libraries and stuff
started to catch up to what R had. And
then people realized, oh well, with
Python, I can work end to end with my
data versus are being very good at data
analysis, but not necessarily like the
data collection stage and various other
I remember going to a Python conference
at one point. I was like, there's so
many sciency people here like where are
all the web developers? This is all data
data pipelines and stuff. I don't want
to be modest about this because it was a
collective effort for the whole
community, but I think that what we did
at Anaconda, not only making the
software installer that made it one
click for people to just run, but also
shephering the conferences and building
that community and and whatnot was
really critical. They were incredibly
important contributions.
I think we actually made Python super
popular. I I think we did
Well, I remember hearing from a friend
of mine that Guido Van Rosum was just
working at Google. And that when I
thought about it, I'm like, wait, yeah,
Guido, I guess, works at a normal
company and I can't remember the exact
circumstances, but I think either I got
an introduction to him or I just maybe I
think maybe just send him an email
saying, "Hey, um, big fan of your work."
you know, it's like fan mail basically.
And he responded and and we got lunch. I
mean, he's a hero of mine and he was
totally friendly and approachable. And
at that talk, it was revealed that
Dropbox was entirely written in Python,
both the client and the server, and that
was exciting.
He was interested in what we were doing
with Python. And I think we were
stretching the language and the runtime
in interesting ways. He approached me
again and said, "Hey, we would really
like you to work for us."
And then to my surprise and delight, he
ended up joining the Dropbox team, which
was super exciting for all of us.
I stayed there for 7 years. We did more
important stuff for Python than I did
during 7 years at Google. I think
I think he had a big impact on the rest
of the team. You know, here's someone
who's one of the icons of computing, but
you would never know it just from his,
you know, how he badges in to the office
every day and I think set a really great
example in terms of being super humble
and curious and friendly. You know, it's
hard for me to think of someone who has
had more impact with lower ego.
Uh, let's start with the first Python
license plate.
that was my car where they lived in
Virginia and there was a box on the
application. Sorry, just grabbing the
other one, too.
Uh, do you want a custom license plate?
So, I managed to get Python in Virginia
and in California, Python was long
Like someone in Silicon Valley probably
has a Python Python license plate
somewhere. So, the best I could get was
Pi3K, which I thought was pretty pretty
cute. Anyway,
it became ever more popular and people
started thinking about flaws in the
There were a lot of uh ideas floating
around the core development community,
changes you could make to the language
that people thought would be major
improvements. The only problem with them
was that they would break old Python
code that currently existed. Some of
that probably got away from us a little
bit in hindsight.
We released Python 3.0 in December of
7. I remember cuz I was actually
interning under Guido at the time. We
were giving people roughly 5 years I
think to do the transition and everyone
thought that was just extraordinarily
generous. The world would totally be on
Python 3 in just a few years. this is
best for the language long term. We're
going to make these changes. The
communities always come along with us.
We think they'll come along this journey
as well.
We were very naive about that and they
they made us know it.
The community said, "No, not worth it.
Kill it. Don't do it. It's not going to
work." This included some very notable
individuals in the community.
So, please welcome our next speaker.
Hi, my name is Amen. You might be
familiar with some of the Python
libraries that I wrote and you might
even maybe use some of them. The Python
2 to Python 3 transition. Initially, it
happened very gradually over many years.
That was the version that everybody used
and there was sort of the version on the
side that I built that nobody used.
People didn't want to put in the effort
because their code worked, you know, why
rewrite it.
It's very hard to mix Python 2 and
It's uh it's a it's a headache.
So I I just didn't move and a lot of
people didn't move. It felt there's a
likelihood that it will not go anywhere.
It felt much more like a top- down
decision than any of the things in the
past. And that top- down decision, I
think for some people felt like it was
not inclusive of the real pains of
people who had a long tale of use cases.
I think I severely underestimated how
successful Python already was. How many
people had written so much code in
Python 2 that it would be hard for them
to sort of put the effort into
translated to Python 3. I thought
the most controversial thing by far was
that we wanted to change the way Unicode
was handled.
A way to say these things are strings
and they're human consumable. They're
words that people want to read and write
and these things are bytes. These are
things that computers want to read and
We basically made all strings unic code
and we made you use a new prefix B for
bytes. And this was incredibly
disturbing. I was implementing a WGI
library at the time and one of the
things that you do when you implement
WGI is that you have to parse HTTP data.
You have to parse cookie data. And there
there was always a mixture of bytes and
uni-ode. And it was very easy to work
with on Python 2. And it was incredibly
annoying to work on Python 3. At least
initially. there really wasn't a way to
convert your Python 2 code to Python 3.
The tools didn't exist.
I started writing blog posts about it.
Why I think that in the way which Python
3 works right now, I just cannot see the
He was a valued community member. And at
the time I was actually quite surprised
that he was so viciously attacking
Python uh 3.
I was probably even more negative on it
than appropriate. But Python has such a
good run and I put so much energy into
it. I was part of like building out web
frameworks and and all these libraries.
I felt like why are we ruining all of
this with this move that didn't even
have that many benefits. I had not
appreciated how many people already had
enormous code bases or were on their way
to building up enormous code bases. The
payback for that was that I had to
initiate the project at Dropbox. We had
a pretty long road to migrate many
millions of lines of Python 2 code.
5 million lines of code in the server
alone and another million for the
client. That is a very large pile of
code to transform. And so we had to
invent ways of sort of doing it in in
[Laughter]
A funny sticker I found in my pocket.
There's a bill tool called Basil. It's
sort of a frozen version of Python 2. So
here the sticker says after re-education
enemy of the people python denounced
their bourgeoa class renounced formalist
notions like tour incompleteness and
began a new life as citizen starark.
This is especially an example of
Benjamin Peterson's humor.
I had the fortune or the misfortune
depending how you see it uh to be the uh
Python 2.7 release manager for an entire
We had to adjust our plans for Python 3
and for Python 2 so that there was a
longer series of releases where there
were both new Python 2 versions and new
Python 3 versions. What ended up
happening is then the community was like
maintaining two and three and that
created a lot of burden and so this was
happening all during the growth of
numpy. We made it work for Python 2 and
then I think Python 31 I think or 32 we
also made it work there but saw no
We knew it was going to take a long
time. Uh we knew it was going to be
painful but there is light at the end of
the tunnel.
The community contributed stuff like lib
2 to 3 and other migration tools came
Benjamin Peterson wrote six that really
helped that transition.
The language itself became a little more
backwards compatible.
I eventually advocated to bring back the
U prefix on the strings and that
actually made it easier to write unified
code bases that target both Python 2 and
Python 3. There was a point in time
where we made a very strong declaration
there will never be a Python 2.8 and
Python 3 is the future.
Python 3 just is a better language and
it is getting better over time. Python 2
on the other hand is a fine language and
it will remain exactly what it is. For a
long time, there was a lot of
measurement of how much Python 2 usage
is there, how much Python 3 usage is
there. I think it was when Python was
important was roughly when we started to
see like 50/50. Once 3.4 came out, it
actually added some features that were
interesting to people like, oh, I want
that capability. So, to me, Python 3.4
was really Python 3.0. And then 35 was
an even bigger milestone. That was the
one that got widespread adoption of
Python 3. And by the time Python 3.5
came out, then it was clear that Python
3 would work.
And then you started to have companies
come out and give talks like Instagram's
talk, which I believe is also at
Portland, was a big deal.
Yes, you heard it right. Instagram has
been running fully on Python 3 for a few
months. The whole process took I would
say about 9 to 10 months. And I think
Instagram is the largest production
deployment for Python at the time. She
gave a very good very thorough talk
explaining why they did it.
Two main things typing and async.io.
How they did it.
We cleaned out all the libraries that
are not making the migration from Python
2 to 3.
How you should do it.
Unit test.
What they had learned during the
We had actually some good performance
gains as well. After our migration,
it felt as vindication that at least
there were large companies that took the
time to do it right and to convert all
their code to Python 3 and were able to
do it successfully.
It was definitely wellreceived. We got a
lot of people saying we really wanted to
migrate as well, but we weren't getting
the kind of support that uh my team or
my my company was giving us. And now I
can bring this back to my management.
And that really gave people uh
confidence in migrating to Python 3.
It became like a look, Instagram can do
it. Why don't you do it? Instagram's
getting benefits, new features, faster
code. Why don't you also want that
Projects undergo things like this. And
Python learned a lot from it and it did
actually eventually end up with Python 3
being a pretty good spot again that it
was safe to use. And safe to use sounds
weird but like where I felt like I can
actually start new projects on Python 3
now because we're back to a stable
situation where you're about as
productive as I felt like I was with
Python 2. Hi
Anna, nice to meet you. I really liked
your talk.
But it was basically time that healed
it. When Python 2.7 was declared that
there wouldn't be any more security
fixes, it became a security concern.
That was sort of the the final push.
People who donated their work uh to do
this migration in the wider Python world
and community eventually got the world
running on Python 3, but as I said like
it was a decadel long process. And I
don't think anybody anticipated how much
work it would be to move to Python 3. I
think Python's probably too big to ever
go through a transition like that today.
The community was
maybe a little too big, but not too big.
I even still get angry messages
sometimes from people who are like, "My
code needs Python 2.7. You need to
provide it." And I tell them, "No."
I never wavered in my commitment to
Python 3. It was a lesson learned for
sure. For a long time, I regularly joked
there would be a Python 4, but the
transition would be handled much better
than the transition to Python 3. I felt
I owed that to the community. And now
now the the mantra has changed to there
will never be even a Python 4. To be
honest, I don't know how many people in
Python even know about the whole
transition because that all ended in
2020. At least it's behind us.
Okay, so now we get in the closet.
So there there's the Frisbee.
This is the most unique merch I've ever
seen related to Python.
Now, here's a significant t-shirt. It
says, "Python is for girls."
I received this
anonymously
in the mail at Google. And to this day,
I don't know exactly what the intention
of the sender was. They never revealed
themselves, at least not to me. And I
don't know if there was an intention
even. But I sort of realized at that
point that there wasn't a whole lot
of women in the the Python community
and the community also discovered that
and fixed it for the Python conference.
This idea of being a place where people
from a wide range of backgrounds can
learn how to program, benefit from
programming, find community. There
really was some snowballing adoption of
these ideas across languages at the
Jessica Mckeler looks at the speakers at
Pyon and says, "There's only 3% that are
women. What can we do about this?" She
was co-organizer of the biggest Python
meetup in the world in Boston. She knew
what she was talking about.
It's not rocket science. It's like ask
people if they're interested in speaking
and we just providing like a little bit
of support
drove a huge shift
in the volume and demographics of the
talks that were submitted
and then 3 years later like 35% of the
speakers are women. I forget what the
number was but I think it was almost
even with male speakers. PYON.
I had an old tweet about this, so I just
pulled this up. Says, "Hello from your
PYON diversity chair." So, the
percentage of Pyon talks by women 2011
was 1%, 2012, it was 7%, 2013, 15%, 2014
and 2015, 33%.
And in 2016, 40%.
Problems have solutions. That was a very
inspiring story to me. Also something
that was less inspiring to me was that
at the language summit there wasn't a
single woman in the room and I don't
believe we have a single female
committer to core Python.
There wasn't ever
ill intent but unfortunately we fell
into the trap of not doing enough
diversity reach out to try to get more
people to come in. To be honest it was a
lot of white men. So Guido wanted to
change that. I want at least two female
core Python devs in the next year and I
will try to train them myself if that's
what it takes.
So come talk to me.
I believe one of the first people who
took up that call was Marietta.
Even though I've always been passionate
about technology and programming, I also
felt it wasn't a welcoming environment
for women. My schoolmates who took
computer science are mostly men. Most of
the professors were men and at work most
of my co-workers were men and I just
didn't really have examples or role
models of women being successful
in tech industry.
One of my co-workers went to Pycon. He
saw that at that conference there is
this community called PI ladies
and I felt like
I want to meet them.
So in 2015, that's when I decided I want
to go to Pyon.
At this conference, I get to see a lot
of women speaking and presenting.
At my previous tech conference, all
speakers were men. All the keynote
speakers were men. So this was really
different.
One of the keynote speakers at that same
conference was Guido Fandras.
Hello everybody. Glad to see you all.
I want to meet and see the creator of
Python programming language
and I will try to train them myself if
that's what it takes.
I heard this speech. However, at that
time, I just didn't think that it's
I could do. I wasn't even contributing
to the Python community. I didn't
contribute to open source at all. I just
thought I'm sure they will find women
next year.
The year after I went back to Pyon US
and Guido Rosson gave another keynote.
We still don't have two female core
developers.
I think at that time that's something
really clicked on me like I realized
that there's something within me that
says if nobody's doing it I will do it.
I wrote to Guido Fanzam and I asked him
for help.
Somehow I I felt really scared. I just
didn't feel like I deserve mentorship
from Guido Fan Rosen. So I was really
hesitated to send this email to him. But
in the end I I realized that I want to
try like I felt like this was a great
opportunity for me. I pressed the send
I got a reply. He was very friendly. He
started sharing resources about, you
know, how to get started contributing to
Python. He offered to do like video
chats. It's been really helpful to have
his moral support. We had a pretty sort
of deep mentorship relationship for a
few years. Maria learned the process
from Guido and continued to contribute
more and more very much around tooling
like she really uh found her niche in
terms of trying to help make our
development process easier.
It was scary at first, like I just
didn't feel comfortable sharing my
questions in public. I didn't want
people to know that I don't know how to
do certain things, you know, like I
didn't want people to see that I'm
actually not that good. But this is how
it it works in open source. And the
community has always been kind and
helped me with my questions without
saying that you're stupid. Like I never
felt like I was being judged.
I think it does start with
Guido. The fact that Guido was very
active in bringing more voices into
Python absolutely made Python better and
stronger. Just the way the whole
community works and what we stand for,
thanks to Guido's leadership, is where I
want to be. And I think that's true for
a lot of people.
About six, seven months after I started
reaching out to Guido, I was recommended
to become a Python core developer.
It really wasn't until 4 months ago that
for the first time ever.
There's there's a woman
there's a woman who became a Python core
developer and earned that commit
privilege.
The first woman ever to join our team
and has continued to be there and
participate and try to help us and
always a very good advocate to try to
improve our diversity.
I see.
Okay. Now that I've seen the camera,
what's I can't
My life really changed after that. A lot
of opportunities opened up just because
I'm a Python core developer.
how are you?
Mara went on to give her own set of
talks about how important mentorship is.
When you don't have role models who you
can relate to,
you start believing that you cannot do
it. Thank you. Hi everybody. Uh my name
is Marata. I'm a PI lady. Um I run PI
Ladies Vancouver.
I also help with the P ladies con. 10
years ago I was also in this room in the
P ladies lunchon at Pyon US 2015. It was
a life-changing event for me. It was at
that event that I felt for the first
time in my life as a developer,
I felt like I belong in tech because I
see 100 women in the room with me. I
just want other women to have role
models. I hope I can help inspire them
and help them. These opportunities
belong to you, too. You're all the
reason I do this because I know there's
still a lot to do and I know together we
can help each other and support each
Okay, I think that's it. Thank you so
much everybody.
[Applause]
I have been so consistently
impressed by the Python community's
ability to have respectful and and real
reflection and dialogue about how
to steward itself and how to move it
forward in a way that I find so
inspiring and a vision of what is
possible in other communities. And I
mean that really sincerely.
There were an ever growing number of
sort of scientific disciplines
where all the code was written in Python
or a lot of it was prototyped in Python
at least. And then the next step was
machine learning packages which started
with TensorFlow and was later followed
by uh PyTorch.
For a long time, Python was seen sort of
as a scripting language that you would
just do small things that you need to
automate and not production ready code
and so it wasn't given a ton of
attention. And then now a IML has sort
of changed things where it is now a
business driver. It appeals to people
who are not professional programmers but
need software to do a task.
There are some other languages like R
you can do some interesting stuff in but
Python is really it for a IML these
Python has probably like centuries of
engineering time that has gone into code
in the ecosystem specifically on those
topics. So if you're using Python,
you're able to instantly tap into those
libraries.
Meta has PyTorch which has a amazing
Python API and front end people can
interact with. There's also Scypi,
NumPy, Numba, Pandas. There's a whole
suite of really extensive tools.
Trying to build a language and a
language ecosystem that is amendable to
all of that is non-trivial. That
actually took real design, real thought,
and real ecosystem collective innovation
over the course of decades.
The back end of those tools are usually
C or Forran or some other native
language that's much faster, but would
be difficult for someone with an AI
background to program in.
And it continues to be used for all that
by all the uh AI scientists developing
the models and the people training the
models, people using the models and uh
that brings yet another increment of of
growth to the Python community.
Python's a fantastic language even if
you're not a scientist. I just don't
think it would have risen to the level
of dramatic usage without the science
first data science and machine learning
story. We had a massive impact in the
You know, I think one testament to the
future of Python is if you prompt any of
the LLMs to do code generation today. If
it's front end, it's going to be
JavaScript. If it's backend data
analysis, it's going to be Python.
That's the future. And Python is a part
of that future. Lucky me that I that I
chose that language and not not a
different one.
Hey, JGO.
Oh, hello money.
Hope you don't mind being filmed.
Ah, okay.
He does following me.
All right.
Yeah, she's she's shooting some B-roll
for the documentary, I think.
Ah, nice.
I first used Python in 1997 or something
like that.
Wow, that's really early days.
So, it's got 30 frames of animation.
Oh, wow.
I told everyone that he would hate
getting the DSA, but they did it anyway.
Yeah. Sorry. The DSA
distinguished service award. I labeled
him in the annual report as like a
leader in the Python community once and
he made me take it out.
Yeah, we can see that. But nevertheless,
he was on the steering council for five
And he was a leader.
I got a job from a Python conference
back in 2017. I grew up in India. I
moved to Germany. changed my life. So I
think like Python changed a lot of
things for me and I just wanted to like
say thanks to you
for for making this language like
that's very sweet.
Do you mind if I uh take a picture with
you or that you don't like it?
I'm so sorry. I really don't like it and
especially not in busy places.
Okay, no problem. I get it.
Okay. Find me in a dark alley and I'll
do it.
Okay. Okay. I get it.
I always kind of looked at myself as the
bass player of Python, which is great.
You know, you can do a lot, you can have
fun, and the spotlight's not on you. And
I love that. I I can't imagine having
that kind of spotlight on you, you know,
for so many years. I heard a story from
a Apple VP of engineering that Steve
Jobs had turned down their hire of Guido
because he said he has his own following
and we don't want to have that kind of
distraction.
Python has always been a language that
changed. We've never been one of those
languages that says if you write code
against this version of Python, it will
run forever with any new version of the
language. We just simply have never been
those people.
A PEP is an acronym for Python
enhancement proposal. That's a document
that's written by someone who wants to
make a significant change to Python.
Basically, you're trying to convince
people that this is a good idea. It
would be sent for discussion for a
mailing list and then eventually Guido
as the BDFL, the benevolent dictator for
life, would decide whether your change
was going in or not.
always have worried that the next change
is going to be the one that changes the
feel of the language. It won't fit my
brain anymore or it won't be accessible
anymore. I've actually seen people storm
out of rooms saying, "You're ruining
this language." Some people take it
very, very personally and seriously. And
the Wallace operator was no different.
Yeah. So, PEP Pep Pep 572, I don't know
who coined the term the walrus operator,
but if you kind of turn your head, it
looks like a little walrus.
It was a new feature that was proposed,
but it was also a syntax change. The
Walrus operator lets you do assignments,
meaning put values into variables in
places that you previously could not.
That was probably the most contentious
language change, oddly enough, because
it's kind of a minor thing, but it it
there was so much passionate feeling
about whether that should be added or
not that it created kind of a bit of a
of a ruckus. When I first saw the walrus
operator, I didn't like it. It kind of
felt a little unpythonic to me, but then
I started to play with it. There was a
particular use case that I came up with
in my own code that I was like, "Oh, you
know what? this is actually pretty cool.
And so then I was like, well, I it's
something that I won't use very often,
but when I need it, it's really great to
have. And I turned, you know, 180° and
became a fan of it. But it was very
disruptive.
Language features and especially syntax
can be a double-edged sword. So one
person's succinct, elegant code can be
another person's unreadable puzzle or a
fosticated mess. There were very
strongly voiced predictions about how
bad it would be for Python. And then
just because Python is was so much more
popular at the time, there are so many
places where people talk about Python. I
mean Twitter, you know, at the time
this is all happening in public, right?
And everyone can kind of with low effort
throw their head into the ring and not
everyone is going to restrain themselves
when they're doing it.
I started being more and more convinced
that PEP 572 was actually the right
thing to do. I was the BDFL
and I accepted the PEP.
And the next morning I woke up
and I felt miserable
because of all the attacks that had
happened before.
I sat down at my computer,
wrote a short email,
and hit send wherein I announced that I
resigned at BDFL.
And that had an incredible impact
cuz nobody had expected I would resign
and certainly not that they would rage
quit over this issue, which essentially
it was.
transfer of power. And now that PEP 572
is done, I don't ever want to have to
fight so hard for a PEP and find that so
many people despise my decisions. I
would like to remove myself entirely
from the decision process. I'm basically
giving myself a permanent vacation from
being BDFL and you all will be on your
own. I am not going to appoint a
successor. So what are you all going to
do? Create a democracy, anarchy, a
dictatorship, a federation? I'll still
be here, but I'm trying to let you all
figure something out for yourselves. I'm
tired and I need a very long break.
That was it.
Haven't read that. That was I thought
that was pretty well written.
I like to say he mic dropped his way
out. You know, he just was like, I'm
out. I'm done. You guys figure it out.
So, it was a complete and total shock to
me. Yeah.
I just felt really sad about it. I wish
he would have retired under better
circumstances.
I felt I needed to take a step back to
sort of recover myself.
I think a lot of people really felt for
Guido, you know, that he could be pushed
to that point like
maybe we let him down to allow
the vitriol over this
change to Python to push, you know,
somebody that we cared about to that
We all perceive that it was like a a
occasion or like a significant change
that you would put a mark in your
timeline in the history book in in the
history of Python, right? Because it had
been run on the BDFL model for uh its
its entire existence. So there was a
little bit of uncertainty like can this
work at all without got inquido
it kind of apparent saying it's time for
you to grow up and figure it out on your
own. I'm not going to solve this problem
for you.
The first order of business was deciding
on how to decide. And it turns out some
people have very strong opinions on
voting systems. Programmers love arguing
about voting methods. I remember
thinking this isn't going to work. Lot
of strong voices. It's really difficult
when you have hundreds of core
developers and thousands of people
online and millions of people in the
community and probably billions of
dollars of software that run on Python.
You can't think about that cuz it
definitely gets overwhelming. I will
fully admit it was stressful. I had to
go to an ear, nose, and throat
specialist because I actually was
starting to choke on my own throat from
the stress. It was not fun because if we
couldn't decide on how we were going to
decide, the project was done. We really
approached it like the nerdy engineers
we are. In Python classic fashion, we
wrote a bunch of peps. We didn't want to
rush it because we knew we were going to
have to live with this potentially
forever. But we also realized the world
was watching and did not like the idea
of not knowing whether the sandwich was
going to be around in a year or not
because we couldn't stop bickering among
ourselves about how to run ourselves.
People sponsored different kinds of
models. I think there was one which was
like let's pick another BDFL because
that's what we feel comfortable with.
And then there was various kinds of
committees and councils and we ended up
settling on the fivep person steering
committee.
Good morning PYON chair.
Thanks so much for joining us.
with these chairs.
So, welcome to our panel with Python
steering council.
Because there's five people, you don't
have the same problem of like all the
stress and responsibility of making
these decisions falling on one person.
I actually felt that it made sense for
me to be on that first steering council
given that there was no longer feeling
so burned out or attacked to provide
some amount of continuity. You know how
this goes when your kid goes off to
college. Some of you may have experience
with that. you're no longer directly
involved in their lives maybe, but you
never stop worrying. And that's how I
feel about Python at the moment. And
that's why I
[Applause]
why I nominated myself for the steering
committee and here I am.
There were elections for the second year
steering council and first I nominated
myself and then withdrew because there
were enough other strong candidates.
They didn't need me and I was happy to
to sort of let go of it.
The legitimacy that came from the
replacement springing up from the
community is essential to it being
accepted. It came from us, so it's
accepted by us. It works. I think it
works for us now. There may be a time in
the future where it doesn't work or
pieces of it don't work. You have to be
willing to evolve. Change is the one
universal constant of the universe. And
so things will always change and you
have to be ready and willing to adapt to
It started out as a hobby project.
Definitely. I think I probably wanted to
prove something to myself more than
anything. It exceeded my wildest
expectations and it actually continues
to do so.
I constantly hear from people whose
lives were completely changed by Python
and it has created this incredible
community which was also a complete sort
of bonus over everything else I I had
anticipated. this community that has
like a massive conference every year and
smaller conferences in every continent I
think except Antarctica.
There was one of the Python conferences
where there was a few thousand people in
the audience. I remember just looking
around and going this is this is
mind-blowing. That's the point at which
I knew we had achieved something
important, something that made a
difference in people's lives and in the
Python turned out to be much more
successful than perhaps any of us
thought except maybe Guo and his team. I
think they always believed that this was
the future. And of course, it's now one
of the most popular, if not the most
popular programming language in the
world. He spent two weeks in Christmas
in like 1989 writing a programming
language because he thought it would be
fun. Like who would have imagined that
that would be such a lifealtering and
also worldaltering thing to have done.
I think it's been great for the world. I
think it's made people feel like they
can get into programming when they never
thought they could. I think it made
programming accessible to people.
It's literally part of kindergarten
through grade 12 education around the
world. and is on Mars thanks to being
used as a scripting language to process
the parachute of the Perseverance rover
landing. Like it's hard to think of
anything that hasn't been touched by
some Python code somewhere. It's
mindboggling. It's an important
language. It's a popular language. It's
a vibrant and relevant language today as
much as it was in the past and I believe
as much as it will be in the future.
Programmers 30 years from now will be
like, "Oh yeah, you know, I I'm still
using Python." Just like today people
are still using forran and C and C++ and
those are old languages you know too in
the scheme of things scheme lisp another
old language. So yeah
Now I keep thinking of like weird jokes.
There's this library in Python called
pickles because pickle is a funny word.
I guess the documentation used to have a
footnote about how you should imagine
Guido and Jim sniffing pickles.
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