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Python: The Documentary [video]
- agentultra 1y agoI 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.
- attogram 1y ago1 hour and 24 minutes of python history, love it!
- __loam 1y ago[flagged]
- jibal 1y agoJustify that claim.
- __loam 1y agoI wonder if the popularity of a language that is dynamically typed, interpreted, and incapable of using OS features like threads has wasted more money than its proponents claim to have saved in so called development time. Languages like Go have existed for over a decade but we're still writing critical services in Python because we insist on teaching new programmers this garbage first before throwing them into the wilderness with no other tools.
- umvi 1y agoI 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"
- kev009 1y agoI was a big fan of python between 10 and 15 years ago for similar reasons, it felt "cleaner" than other scripting languages while also having rich standard and extended libraries. With no real recent experience (I fell deep down the hole into C/kernel etc), I wouldn't have any authority to judge how it's adapted to time. But the most common complaint I've observed at companies of all size and sophistication is "the deployment story is a disaster". But it also seems like uv allows people to do all the "I want this specific version of such and such and I don't want $OS to know about any of this" well? Re math/ai it's an interesting comment because a language is one part the syntax/stuff you receive, and one part the community that tells you to do things a certain way. I'd guess that Python has become such a big tent it is a little hard to enforce norms that other languages seem to have. This somewhat reminds me of Bjarne Stroustrup discussing scaling/evolving a language.
- nighthawk454 1y agoI think a lot of it is things have shifted away from the raw language. Less and less you’re dealing with Python, and more an assortment of libraries or frameworks. Pandas, numpy, torch, fastapi, …, and a dozen others. Packaging has been a nightmare. PyPI has had its challenges. Dependency management is vastly improved thanks to uv - recently, and with a graveyard of tools in its wake. The modern Python script feels more like loosely combining a temperamental set of today’s latest library apis, and then dealing with the fallout. Sometimes parallels the Node experience. I think an actual Python project - using only something remotely modern like 3.2+ standard library and maybe requests - is probably just as clean, resilient, and reliable as it ever was. A lot of these things are and/or have been improving tremendously. But think to your point the language (or really the ecosystem) is scaling and evolving a ton and there’s growing pains.
- kev009 1y agoI can see that. A little while ago I was working at a startup and we had a node.js thing that was really crucial to the business that did some gray hat browser automation stuff to scrape TikTok (the users opted into it, but TikTok itself was less permissive). For some reason a person wanted to move part of it to Python to orthogonally solve some other actual problem. They passed me the code and Pandas was there to effectively do an HTTP request and parse JSON and I thought to myself "woah, I'm not in Kansas anymore" -- I ended up not having to worry about it because I ported the idea back to the more mature node system and that turned out to be viable over time. Libraries can overtake aspects of a language for better and worse. Ruby seemed really tied to Rails and that was great for it as an example.
- yomismoaqui 1y agoGod bless the Go guys for not doing a Python 2 to 3 fiasco
- MilnerRoute 1y agoHere'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-life-in-a-new-documentary/ https://thenewstack.io/guido-van-rossum-revisits-pythons-lif...
- pauleveritt 1y agoThanks for the kind words, but really, I'm over-sung on this. It's been a long time since I impacted Python. I should be participating more. Hopefully t-strings is the place.
- fnord77 1y ago> 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.
- ihaveajob 1y agoI used to love Python. I still love it, but I used to love it, too.
- breatheoften 1y agoHilarious . I was a python fan before I was a reluctant user. It still has the most reliable debugger integration of any mainstream language which is my favorite thing about the language in its current state. Debugger >> language -- next most popular language manifesto slogan (i hope).
- zahlman 1y ago> absurdities like having the default queue be thread safe (sacrificing performance). Why is this absurd? What are you writing where you need to scrape this sort of performance, but are perfectly fine with the overhead of interpreting bytecode at runtime, heap-allocating objects to represent floating-point numbers, not having homogeneous-type arrays that can store their elements contiguously in memory but which must indirect them, etc. etc. etc.? Alternately, what world are you living in where everything a program does is CPU-bound and must be done efficiently? In this world, what led you to examine or try Python in the first place?
- fnord77 1y agoBecause 99% of the time queues don't need to be thread safe. If you need thread safety, use locks or specialized thread-safe versions. Java learned this lesson early.
- roelschroeven 1y ago
- ekianjo 1y ago> most beloved programming language Citation needed
- runjake 1y agoIt’s #1 in the language admired/desired section of this year’s Stack Overflow Developer Survey. Perhaps that’s what they were referencing? https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology/#admired-and-desired https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology/#admired-and...
- janmo 1y agoIt is a very subjective take indeed
- ayhanfuat 1y agoThe 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-this-thursday-august-28/103319/2 https://discuss.python.org/t/python-documentary-going-live-t...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- primitivesuave 1y agoAdding a link to the ZoP for the uninitiated: https://peps.python.org/pep-0020/ https://peps.python.org/pep-0020/
- suchoudh 1y agoIn India people call initiation as Deekhsha. This is where the guru whispers (3 times) to you the seed letters which one has to imbibe over decades of sadhana by lacs of repetition this looks similar #rememberThis
- sim7c00 1y agotry: __main__() except BeingDutchException: print("make some noize!") except: pass how did i do on my python exam? 5.6 is also a pass!
- aliljet 1y agoFor better or worse, I find Python beautiful. And here's an easter egg for everyone (it comes up in the Documentary too): import this Even on HN, indentation reigns king.
- nighthawk454 1y agoAnother fun one :) import antigravity
- Hamuko 1y agoYeah, nothing has really ever hit the same levels of readability that Python has for me, even if a language like Rust is very well-designed and better in many aspects.
- milliams 1y agoI enjoy: >>> from __future__ import braces File "<python-input-2>", line 1 from __future__ import braces ^^^^^^ SyntaxError: not a chance
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoCan update the URL to the doc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfH4QL4VqJ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfH4QL4VqJ0 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45056377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45056377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45050548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45050548)
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoRelated: Interview: Guido van Rossum Revisits Python’s Life in a New Documentary https://thenewstack.io/guido-van-rossum-revisits-pythons-life-in-a-new-documentary/ https://thenewstack.io/guido-van-rossum-revisits-pythons-lif... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45055272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45055272)
- scripper1 1y agoI 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.
- some_guy_nobel 1y ago[flagged]
- primitivesuave 1y agoJust to stymy the spread of misinformation - this is in reference to an interview from 2019 or 2020, where he said he would prioritize women/minorities for mentorship. While I personally don't agree with that notion (IMO mentorship should go to the most qualified person, regardless of race/background), I definitely didn't hear it as a refusal to help white men.
- some_guy_nobel 1y ago[flagged]
- lumpa 1y agoIt is misinformation because it elides the context: white guys got virtually all the mentoring already, represented the absolute majority of core developers, held all the power in steering the language, etc. So what he's saying is: my personal efforts focus on helping those that currently don't get help, don't have a voice. White man are doing fine already, they can forget getting direct help from me because they, as a group, don't need it. So yeah, you can be upset that he's not offering to help those who, as a group, already have a path to getting into Python. Says a lot more about you though.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoTwenty-year Python+ dev here that hasn’t worked in a year and a half. We all need help once in a while.
- some_guy_nobel 1y agoSo, it's okay for someone to say, "I won't help <race> <gender>, they can forget it", as long as <race>="white" and <gender>="male"? And how do you define mentoring? Clubs? Participation in class? Is an Italian man's participation in an open-source project equal to an American's? A Russian's? Why, because they're 'white'? Should a Swedish man then be barred from help?
- mixmastamyk 1y agoOne 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). ;-)
- ddanieltan 1y agoThe launch of the documentary was followed up by a live Q&A session at EuroPython: https://youtu.be/Sf2AqQ5a38Y?si=BbJywWDCMZPgjhlN https://youtu.be/Sf2AqQ5a38Y?si=BbJywWDCMZPgjhlN
- dang 1y agoUrl changed from https://lwn.net/Articles/1035537/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1035537/, which points to this.
- nromiun 1y agoWatching 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.
- ActorNightly 1y agoThere is a reason why NodeJS took off and was pretty much the prominent language on github before all the AI stuff with Python. Mind you this is pure JS, not even Typescript. Processors and memory have gotten cheap enough were development speed matters more than compute cost.
- nromiun 1y agoIMO NodeJS popularity was expected. After all these years you still can't use anything other than JS on the frontend (WASM is still too green). So if you are going to master a language you might as well use it in the backend too.
- wiseowise 1y agoNodeJS took off because V8 is insanely fast for interpreted language and you can use the same language for backend/frontend.
- zahlman 1y agoPython was already pulling way ahead of Perl and Ruby before that, largely due to scientific computing and data analysis stuff.
- bitpush 1y agoIs 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.
- ayhanfuat 1y agoI didn't see him and he is not on the list: "Armin Ronacher, Barry Warsaw, Benjamin Peterson, Brett Cannon, Drew Houston, Guido van Rossum, Jessica McKellar, Ken Manheimer, Lambert Meertens, Lisa Guo, Lisa Roach, Mariatta Wijaya, Paul Everitt, Patrice Lyons, Peter Wang, Robin Friedrich, Robert Kahn, Sjoerd Mullender, Steven Pemberton, Tim O'Reilly, Ton Roosendaal, and Travis Oliphant" I believe he also coined the term duck typing.
- fuzztester 1y agohe has some good Python related material on his site too. e.g.: http://www.aleax.it/python_mat_en.html http://www.aleax.it/python_mat_en.html
- mont_tag 1y agoHistory 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.
- penguin_booze 1y agoUgh, but why is the video so dark?!
- tx5912379 1y agoPython 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.
- bitpush 1y ago> Python got big by impeccable marketing This is so further from the truth that it hurts. It sounds like you're fairly new to python, and you probably only saw python in its third or fourth "wave" at which point there were alternatives, and you could ask why was python being promoted. - The first wave was systems programming (replacing aging perl and bash scripts) - Second wave was web, with django, flask etc. This is also the rise of Ruby on Rails. This cemented python's stature. - Third wave was data analysis, fueled by numpy and pandas - Fourth wave is ML, building on top of third with tensorflow and pytorch. You can argue we've in the fifth wave with LLMs, but it is mostly a 4.5 in my head. If you dont remember waves 1 or 2, it is hard to get a perspective. But python was much much much big by wave 2.
- wraptile 1y agoReally 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.
- TheAlchemist 1y agoNice 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 !
- pjmlp 1y agoNow imagine if the same guy had seen the same workflow being done in Smalltalk or Interlisp-D/Lisp Machines. Jupiter Notebooks are a subset of what the experience felt like in those systems.
- sbinnee 1y agoI 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.
- mdaniel 1y ago"beautiful" is a bit of a stretch. I am completely open to the fact that doing it in a Pythonic way would make the grammar angry but things have gone off the rails when one needs to introduce a 2nd assignment operator into a language if ma = re.search(needle, haystack): print("ok, things are sane") I cannot think of a stellar reason why assignment shouldn't be an expression in sane languages. While digging up the grammar[1] I was also reminded that walrus is seemingly incompatible with type annotations, too >>> if (x: str := re.sub("a", "b", "abc")): File "<python-input-8>", line 1 if (x: str := re.sub("a", "b", "abc")): ^ SyntaxError: invalid syntax Also, you say "temporary variable" but it's no more temporary than any other local variable, because lexical scoping is evidently for children I have always hated that comprehension variables leak for that same reason 1: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/v3.13.7/Grammar/python.gram#L143 https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/v3.13.7/Grammar/pytho...
- mixmastamyk 1y agoThe functionality is sound, but Python already had the “as” pattern available. So I still believe creating a third way to do assignment was a mistake.
- zahlman 1y agoI'm still "surprised" (though I've known for years) that GvR and Peters were in favour of the design and co-wrote the PEP (https://peps.python.org/pep-0572/ https://peps.python.org/pep-0572/), and that the other author is Chris Angelico who I (also) otherwise greatly respect. Where it's useful, it tends to just save a line of code or work around other defects (for example, the regex example near the start of the PEP points to either a missing null-coalescing operator — which has been repeatedly proposed and rejected, BTW — or the library's fault in not using the "null object" pattern). It's used twice for example as far as I can tell in all of pip and its vendored dependencies (>100 kloc), and it isn't really doing much in either case (https://github.com/pypa/pip/blob/main/src/pip/_internal/metadata/importlib/_compat.py#L81 https://github.com/pypa/pip/blob/main/src/pip/_internal/meta... and https://github.com/pypa/pip/blob/main/src/pip/_internal/metadata/importlib/_dists.py#L168 https://github.com/pypa/pip/blob/main/src/pip/_internal/meta... ; it was also used in `typing_extensions` but that's been dropped as a dependency; there are some false-positives related to code that parses source code and some data formats). But most importantly to me, it fundamentally violates the strong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command%E2%80%93query_separation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command%E2%80%93query_separati... seen throughout the rest of the language. Meanwhile, changes that I think might actually be good are nowadays routinely rejected with the same kinds of arguments that PEP 572 faced and survived. It's unfortunate that Guido felt harassed and ended up leaving the project. It was overall better under his leadership. I wish I'd been paying attention at the time. I suspect that the people who created that feeling must have themselves felt betrayed.
- braza 1y agoOf 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.
- hitekker 1y agoIt'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.
- vkaku 1y agoI 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.
- AlexK90 1y agoInteresting and enjoyable documentary. Thanks to the CultRepo team for putting it out there!