4 ms·

The History of Python

65 points by bockris 18y ago

Python is 19 years old and Guido Van Rossum is starting a new blog on the history of the language. Here is the from his regular blog that announces it. http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/01/history-of-python-introduction.html

lehmannro 18y ago
See also Guido's introductory announcement for this post. http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/01/history-of-python-introduction.html http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/01/history-of-python-in...
stcredzero 18y ago
"The ABC group wanted to isolate the user, as completely as possible, from the big, bad world of computers...ABC should be the only tool they ever needed. This desire also caused the ABC group to create a complete integrated editing environment, unique to ABC" The problem with this design choice, is that it isolates you from the rest of the software ecosystem. This is why PHP became part of the LAMP stack and why Smalltalk became isolated and esoteric. In this sense, Perl, Ruby, and Python all made a beneficial choice to be good citizens in the Unix-like space.
PieSquared 18y ago
One of the comments is good. Basically, it asks, why the need for semicolons at all?
- johnrob 18y ago
  Probably to make it easier for programmers who end lines with them as a knee jerk reaction. After a stint of java or javascript, I find myself doing it too.
  - eru 18y ago
    And you can put two or more commands on one line.
    - blasdel 18y ago
      I use them for this purpose in both Python and Ruby when there's a formatting win to be had.
    - gaius 18y ago
      Yeah. Often it's bad style, but IMHO if you just need to do something like: x = 0; y = []; z = None Then it is actually clearer to group them together, it means more "real code" on screen at a time.
      - eru 18y ago
        I do not know whether that was a good example to show the benefits of the semicolon: x, y, z = 0, [], None
        lehmannro 18y ago
        While the semicolon is only a convenience it has some common use cases. For example shoot-and-forget invokations of third party modules: import sys; sys.exit() import pdb; pdb.set_trace() import cgitb; cgitb.enable() import psyco; psyco.full() import pygtk; pygtk.require('2.0') And of course it's pretty useful in environments where one-liner are easier to handle: $ python -c "import mymod; mymod.test()"
        gaius 18y ago
        Now that I look in my code I actually have: import matplotlib; matplotlib.use('Agg'); from matplotlib import pyplot
      - ulf 18y ago
        In this case you could just use: x, y, z = 0, [], None

65 points by bockris 18y ago

lehmannro 18y ago

See also Guido's introductory announcement for this post. http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/01/history-of-python-introduction.html http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/01/history-of-python-in...

stcredzero 18y ago

"The ABC group wanted to isolate the user, as completely as possible, from the big, bad world of computers...ABC should be the only tool they ever needed. This desire also caused the ABC group to create a complete integrated editing environment, unique to ABC" The problem with this design choice, is that it isolates you from the rest of the software ecosystem. This is why PHP became part of the LAMP stack and why Smalltalk became isolated and esoteric. In this sense, Perl, Ruby, and Python all made a beneficial choice to be good citizens in the Unix-like space.

PieSquared 18y ago

One of the comments is good. Basically, it asks, why the need for semicolons at all?

johnrob 18y ago
Probably to make it easier for programmers who end lines with them as a knee jerk reaction. After a stint of java or javascript, I find myself doing it too.
- eru 18y ago
  And you can put two or more commands on one line.
  - blasdel 18y ago
    I use them for this purpose in both Python and Ruby when there's a formatting win to be had.
  - gaius 18y ago
    Yeah. Often it's bad style, but IMHO if you just need to do something like: x = 0; y = []; z = None Then it is actually clearer to group them together, it means more "real code" on screen at a time.
    - eru 18y ago
      I do not know whether that was a good example to show the benefits of the semicolon: x, y, z = 0, [], None
      - lehmannro 18y ago
        While the semicolon is only a convenience it has some common use cases. For example shoot-and-forget invokations of third party modules: import sys; sys.exit() import pdb; pdb.set_trace() import cgitb; cgitb.enable() import psyco; psyco.full() import pygtk; pygtk.require('2.0') And of course it's pretty useful in environments where one-liner are easier to handle: $ python -c "import mymod; mymod.test()"
        gaius 18y ago
        Now that I look in my code I actually have: import matplotlib; matplotlib.use('Agg'); from matplotlib import pyplot
    - ulf 18y ago
      In this case you could just use: x, y, z = 0, [], None