I was fresh at university, around 2001, and our mathematics professor introduced us to Python with NumPy/SciPy as an alternative to the commercial math tools. There aren't many events that changed my career as much as that. Being exposed only to compiled languages before that, it blew my mind. It was friendly, expressive and came with batteries included.
There was a huge sense of community around Python, that I didn't really see elsewhere in the programming world. It started with these scientific libraries. Python wouldn't be what Python is today without NumPy. It was nice to see in the last years the boost of the Python scientific community, with basically anything machine learning using Python as the DSL.
In my university, we were given a choice to use either Matlab or Python for exercises in many advanced courses. We even got Matlab licenses for our personal computers. But since the smallest Matlab installation still came in at several GB and my personal computer was always full with games, I chose the python stack which came in at maybe 100-200 MB for all relevant packages, while nearly everyone else chose Matlab. None of them have ever used Matlab again after University and I still use Python all the time.
I disagree. The scientific libraries were just one of many niches, and an awkward one at that. One could equally say "it started with xml libraries" or "it started with file-handling libraries" or "it started with http libraries" -- all of which were in the Standard Library very early, unlike the horrible-to-build numpy/scipy. All of these made the language popular initially across a number of different crowds. Numpy/scipy reached traction relatively late when Python was already well-established in niches like sysadmin, web, education, 3D, and many others. By 2001 we already had multiple web frameworks, Zope, even WSGI...
It is occasionally annoying how this or that crowd tries to appropriate Python's success, hence flattening its purposes and aims.
I remember a different timeline, but it was probably location-specific. During that time, Perl was the go to tool for sysadmins and PHP just got the point of being usable enough to displace Perl for web development. I personally think CherryPy was what kicked off Python as the web dev platform and it went crazy after that.
he-he, sometimes, but mostly because it shows there are real people behind who have emotions. Agree on rust (put rails or others here) having too much of it sometimes
The great thing is that you don't have to join any community. Python is my favorite language and ever since I got flamed for asking a technical question in their subreddit I stopped going there.
There are hardly any non-toxic programming communities out there. And if you value backward compatibility over everything else you can look at C and C++.
Ruby and Perl are great examples of massively popular languages that withered because the language/platform outpaced the community.
If the first question you’re asking yourself looking at a code base is “what version is this/do I know this version” then that language is not facilitating you.
The successful languages are ones where “the community” prioritises backward compatibility. Java, C, Python have backward compatibility spanning decades. There’s a few discontinuities (lambdas in Java 8, Python 3, C++) but in most cases there’s a clear mapping back to the original. Python 3 is an exception to this but the migration window was something like 15 years…
Busy engineers, scientists and academics have little interest in keeping up to date with language features. A computer and a programming language are a tool for a job and the source code is just an intermediate artifact. These are your “community”, and the stakeholders in your success.
How have they withered? Does every programming language have to compete for world domination via cancerous growth? I thought that only applied to VC backed startups and public companies if the startups survive...
They’re not actively used in any circles I move in. The fact that your back is up suggests you have something invested in these antiquated niche tools.
They have a right to exist. But there is strength in community. Successful platforms facilitate this and provide a means for participants to exceed the sum of there parts.
This can in turn fuel development of the platform therefore helping keep it relevant.
In recent times we call this “the network effect” and it applies to more than just social media.
Have you used them? Perl has version tags in source code and everything is feature gated including the stdlib. Python does none of that. The stdlib changes constantly and just looking at source code gives you no indication if you can run it with your installed python version.
Perl doesn't have "perfect backward compatibility" in the normal sense of the word. There is only Perl 5 which is perfectly compatible since it hasn't changed for 25+ years (which is how they achieved "compatibility" -- by not changing), and there's Perl 6 which isn't backward compatible and nobody really uses it.
I know people don't like Perl, I just want to add some info here.
The Perl 5 Porters have restarted adding new features at 15 years ago. It has progressed from version 5.20 to 5.42. Although the speed is slower than popular languages, they are maintaining backward compatibility while adding new features.
I do not really know which event you mentioned. But if you use the current version of perl interpreter. It still work for most of old versions. And new features keep safe for old perl.
The community withered. 10-15 years ago the cries of “Ruby” “Ruby” “Ruby” were deafening. I used Ruby and I really enjoyed and I thought I would leave Python behind but it but it never went anywhere from there. Somewhere around 3.x I think there were a load of breaking changes introduced and I imagine lots of people like myself just went back to using more stable platforms.
That is all good and well. Unfortunately, it degenerated into a tyranny where a small group of mediocre people grabbed power, censored the infrastructure and threatened people with defamation if they didn't obey.
Most developers have left or have been driven out. The remaining ones do corporate projects that generally underdeliver.
This is very normal - people like that are drawn to the free money available at foundations. Thankfully uv etc from Astral are doing what the very medicore minds at the PSF cannot.
Ah, that makes sense, thanks. A few years ago I saw bullying and harassment in one Python project that was instigated by the code of conduct committee. Seems like history is repeating..
It is striking that this article equates community with bureaucratic efforts like setting up the PSF and getting funding for the PSF. It is essentially a hagiography for the bureaucrats. The omission of Tim Peters, who was later slandered by bureaucrats, is notable.
It didn't. I've seen people in the Python community tear someone's open source project to shreds because "it isn't Pythonic". It really soured me on the Python community when I saw people acting that way.
this summarizes pretty well my first thoughts when reading the headline: "How python grew from a language to a community", because the Python community in 2000, the Python community in 2010, these are a different place to "whole world uses Python" in 2025.
Back then it felt like a bit of a club, one that forms around a common hobby. Nowadays it feels more like the "community" of a high-school graduation class. Sure there is community there, but its mostly one of folks randomly thrown together into classrooms.
Folks like Raymond Hettinger would today be totally drowned out in the listicle-style attention seeking times.
> in the web world
I would put that more broadly though, it was web, data-science, there was a point when it became the universal scripting language, and part of me kind of hoped that the crowd would move to nodejs for all of it, so that Python can become more peaceful again. But I guess there is no going back, we went from dinghi to cruise ship, and when the crowd leaves, it will just be a deserted cruise ship.
I think the Bitcoin part is simple - it doesn't have the perverse incentives of an investment vehicle. Everyone's financial stake is indirect and diffuse, it's not likely that any given PEP is directly connected to a developer's bottom line (though presumably this happens occasionally).
The point is that, unlike in the Bitcoin block size debacle, you don't have people who are pulling in different directions because it directly impacts their bottom line if Python does X or Y. There's no one who particularly profits from there being a GIL.
Nobody is pro-GIL per se. But a lot of people were pro-No-Single-Threaded-Performance-Desegregation. The first GIL-removal patch was submitted all the way back against python 1.4, and regular attempts have been made ever since, but it wasn't possible to remove the GIL without making the single threaded performance of existing python code worse, so Guido and co. refused to accept them.
Grey beards didn’t take Python seriously, or more like they just didn’t care about. C and Java what matters after all and Python is just a toy for beginners!
Python is one of the most toxic communities out there. A couple of people sold out python-dev to their corporations and used the CoC and non-programming related activities to gain power. They drove people out who dared to contradict them.
Some of the clique have been fired later and now CPython is basically a hollow shell with some corporate projects still going on.
The Python community is welcoming, many come for the language and stay for the community. It's not, of course, free of politics or drama, but it's very far from what you describe. Local communities are very strong, CPython core community seems to always be trying to improve to me.
Even Tim Peters, who I really hope is part of the documentary, is an enthusiastic participant, both helping with gnarly CPython issues and providing assistance to newbies.
If you look at the Fellows list[0], you can see that many important names aren't active in the community anymore (I don't know the reasons for each one), but many more are either active or in (very) good terms with the community.
The CoC was and is a net positive, the diversity efforts even more so. Last Saturday I was at a local Python conference and the local community has welcome both, to great success and improvement.
I was fresh at university, around 2001, and our mathematics professor introduced us to Python with NumPy/SciPy as an alternative to the commercial math tools. There aren't many events that changed my career as much as that. Being exposed only to compiled languages before that, it blew my mind. It was friendly, expressive and came with batteries included.
There was a huge sense of community around Python, that I didn't really see elsewhere in the programming world. It started with these scientific libraries. Python wouldn't be what Python is today without NumPy. It was nice to see in the last years the boost of the Python scientific community, with basically anything machine learning using Python as the DSL.
In my university, we were given a choice to use either Matlab or Python for exercises in many advanced courses. We even got Matlab licenses for our personal computers. But since the smallest Matlab installation still came in at several GB and my personal computer was always full with games, I chose the python stack which came in at maybe 100-200 MB for all relevant packages, while nearly everyone else chose Matlab. None of them have ever used Matlab again after University and I still use Python all the time.
> It started with these scientific libraries.
I disagree. The scientific libraries were just one of many niches, and an awkward one at that. One could equally say "it started with xml libraries" or "it started with file-handling libraries" or "it started with http libraries" -- all of which were in the Standard Library very early, unlike the horrible-to-build numpy/scipy. All of these made the language popular initially across a number of different crowds. Numpy/scipy reached traction relatively late when Python was already well-established in niches like sysadmin, web, education, 3D, and many others. By 2001 we already had multiple web frameworks, Zope, even WSGI...
It is occasionally annoying how this or that crowd tries to appropriate Python's success, hence flattening its purposes and aims.
I remember a different timeline, but it was probably location-specific. During that time, Perl was the go to tool for sysadmins and PHP just got the point of being usable enough to displace Perl for web development. I personally think CherryPy was what kicked off Python as the web dev platform and it went crazy after that.
Drama driven development is the truly modern paradigm, and if you think it's limited to Python you're blind.
It's not community, it's meddling, toil, and folly.
true that, perl5 to perl6 (now raku) was a master class in that
Raku is the most modern PL s metric
I stopped using Perl in the early 00s but I've heard rumours, how bad was it?
that's why I love rust!
because you like the drama? It is quite entertaining but so tiresome.
he-he, sometimes, but mostly because it shows there are real people behind who have emotions. Agree on rust (put rails or others here) having too much of it sometimes
OT: if you’re ever in Atlanta, come check out pyatl. We’re a pretty old and established python group. It’s always fun and interesting.
Paul Everitt's confidence and enthusiasm forcontinuous improvement have made Pythonwhat it is today. Thanks
I don't want a community - I want a programming language. Preferably one that doesn't throw away billions of lines of existing code just because.
The great thing is that you don't have to join any community. Python is my favorite language and ever since I got flamed for asking a technical question in their subreddit I stopped going there.
There are hardly any non-toxic programming communities out there. And if you value backward compatibility over everything else you can look at C and C++.
There are countless dead programming languages without communities you can pick then.
Ruby and Perl are great examples of massively popular languages that withered because the language/platform outpaced the community.
If the first question you’re asking yourself looking at a code base is “what version is this/do I know this version” then that language is not facilitating you.
The successful languages are ones where “the community” prioritises backward compatibility. Java, C, Python have backward compatibility spanning decades. There’s a few discontinuities (lambdas in Java 8, Python 3, C++) but in most cases there’s a clear mapping back to the original. Python 3 is an exception to this but the migration window was something like 15 years…
Busy engineers, scientists and academics have little interest in keeping up to date with language features. A computer and a programming language are a tool for a job and the source code is just an intermediate artifact. These are your “community”, and the stakeholders in your success.
How have they withered? Does every programming language have to compete for world domination via cancerous growth? I thought that only applied to VC backed startups and public companies if the startups survive...
They’re not actively used in any circles I move in. The fact that your back is up suggests you have something invested in these antiquated niche tools.
Seriously? I tried Perl only once ever in my life time and I've never done Ruby.
Doesn't mean I have to deny them the right to exist because they don't have a "community*".
* more like a religion for some programming languages.
They have a right to exist. But there is strength in community. Successful platforms facilitate this and provide a means for participants to exceed the sum of there parts.
This can in turn fuel development of the platform therefore helping keep it relevant.
In recent times we call this “the network effect” and it applies to more than just social media.
Have you used them? Perl has version tags in source code and everything is feature gated including the stdlib. Python does none of that. The stdlib changes constantly and just looking at source code gives you no indication if you can run it with your installed python version.
Perl have almost perfect backward compatibility, but small community and bad renown are not so good.
Perl doesn't have "perfect backward compatibility" in the normal sense of the word. There is only Perl 5 which is perfectly compatible since it hasn't changed for 25+ years (which is how they achieved "compatibility" -- by not changing), and there's Perl 6 which isn't backward compatible and nobody really uses it.
I know people don't like Perl, I just want to add some info here. The Perl 5 Porters have restarted adding new features at 15 years ago. It has progressed from version 5.20 to 5.42. Although the speed is slower than popular languages, they are maintaining backward compatibility while adding new features.
Perl6 had been renamed to new language, Raku.
Backwards compatibility is terrible if what you're being backwards compatible with is terrible.
Isn’t the actual “platform” itself fragmented these days? Different language versions, different libraries, different “engine”?
I dunno it was 20 years ago I jumped ship when they tried shoehorning object oriented semantics into it. Eugh.
I do not really know which event you mentioned. But if you use the current version of perl interpreter. It still work for most of old versions. And new features keep safe for old perl.
What makes you think Ruby withered? It has been stagnant, but not withered.
The community withered. 10-15 years ago the cries of “Ruby” “Ruby” “Ruby” were deafening. I used Ruby and I really enjoyed and I thought I would leave Python behind but it but it never went anywhere from there. Somewhere around 3.x I think there were a load of breaking changes introduced and I imagine lots of people like myself just went back to using more stable platforms.
that's what Delphi said
That is all good and well. Unfortunately, it degenerated into a tyranny where a small group of mediocre people grabbed power, censored the infrastructure and threatened people with defamation if they didn't obey.
Most developers have left or have been driven out. The remaining ones do corporate projects that generally underdeliver.
This is very normal - people like that are drawn to the free money available at foundations. Thankfully uv etc from Astral are doing what the very medicore minds at the PSF cannot.
Lol, what does this mean?
Most recently Tim Peters was suspended and many people found the suspension reasons unjustified. I assume the GP is referring to similar events.
Ah, that makes sense, thanks. A few years ago I saw bullying and harassment in one Python project that was instigated by the code of conduct committee. Seems like history is repeating..
Of the Timsort fame, wow.
It is striking that this article equates community with bureaucratic efforts like setting up the PSF and getting funding for the PSF. It is essentially a hagiography for the bureaucrats. The omission of Tim Peters, who was later slandered by bureaucrats, is notable.
I really hope Tim being in the documentary is the plot twist. He deserves a big chunk of time too.
The real question is how did Python avoid the toxicity of the Linux or bitcoin dev community (remember the block size debate?)
Though there was a developer who was forced to quit a while ago.
It didn't. I've seen people in the Python community tear someone's open source project to shreds because "it isn't Pythonic". It really soured me on the Python community when I saw people acting that way.
It actually did, all the way until it got so mainstream in the web world that avoiding drama became basically impossible.
Until the "cool kids" started meddling, it was a lovely village. It had a strong focus on beginners and teachers.
this summarizes pretty well my first thoughts when reading the headline: "How python grew from a language to a community", because the Python community in 2000, the Python community in 2010, these are a different place to "whole world uses Python" in 2025.
Back then it felt like a bit of a club, one that forms around a common hobby. Nowadays it feels more like the "community" of a high-school graduation class. Sure there is community there, but its mostly one of folks randomly thrown together into classrooms.
Folks like Raymond Hettinger would today be totally drowned out in the listicle-style attention seeking times.
> in the web world
I would put that more broadly though, it was web, data-science, there was a point when it became the universal scripting language, and part of me kind of hoped that the crowd would move to nodejs for all of it, so that Python can become more peaceful again. But I guess there is no going back, we went from dinghi to cruise ship, and when the crowd leaves, it will just be a deserted cruise ship.
Yeah, like most (maybe all) communities, Pythonistos can be pretty toxic if you're not in the in-group.
I think the Bitcoin part is simple - it doesn't have the perverse incentives of an investment vehicle. Everyone's financial stake is indirect and diffuse, it's not likely that any given PEP is directly connected to a developer's bottom line (though presumably this happens occasionally).
Big companies submit PEPs to force their will on Python. Meta and GIL removal.
Who is pro-GIL...?
The point is that, unlike in the Bitcoin block size debacle, you don't have people who are pulling in different directions because it directly impacts their bottom line if Python does X or Y. There's no one who particularly profits from there being a GIL.
Who is pro-GIL
Nobody is pro-GIL per se. But a lot of people were pro-No-Single-Threaded-Performance-Desegregation. The first GIL-removal patch was submitted all the way back against python 1.4, and regular attempts have been made ever since, but it wasn't possible to remove the GIL without making the single threaded performance of existing python code worse, so Guido and co. refused to accept them.
Grey beards didn’t take Python seriously, or more like they just didn’t care about. C and Java what matters after all and Python is just a toy for beginners!
Do Grey beards care about AI?
The Lisp grey beards do.
They are AI
Did you just come out from under your rock?
Python is one of the most toxic communities out there. A couple of people sold out python-dev to their corporations and used the CoC and non-programming related activities to gain power. They drove people out who dared to contradict them.
Some of the clique have been fired later and now CPython is basically a hollow shell with some corporate projects still going on.
This is completely bonkers.
The Python community is welcoming, many come for the language and stay for the community. It's not, of course, free of politics or drama, but it's very far from what you describe. Local communities are very strong, CPython core community seems to always be trying to improve to me.
Even Tim Peters, who I really hope is part of the documentary, is an enthusiastic participant, both helping with gnarly CPython issues and providing assistance to newbies.
If you look at the Fellows list[0], you can see that many important names aren't active in the community anymore (I don't know the reasons for each one), but many more are either active or in (very) good terms with the community.
The CoC was and is a net positive, the diversity efforts even more so. Last Saturday I was at a local Python conference and the local community has welcome both, to great success and improvement.
[0] https://www.python.org/psf/fellows-roster/
Who sold it out?