New Python Documentary Released On YouTube (youtube.com)
- Reference: 0178939344
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/08/30/0314222/new-python-documentary-released-on-youtube
- Source link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfH4QL4VqJ0
Long-time Slashdot reader [2]destinyland writes:
> It traces Python all the way back to its origins in Amsterdam back in 1991. (Although the first time Guido van Rossum showed his new language to a co-worker, they'd typed one line of code just to prove they could crash Python's first interpreter.) The language slowly spread after van Rossum released it on Usenet — split across 21 separate posts — and Robin Friedrich, a NASA aerospace engineer, remembers using Python to build flight simulations for the Space Shuttle. (Friedrich says in the documentary he also attended Guido's first in-person U.S. workshop in 1994, and "I still have the t-shirt...")
>
> Dropbox's CEO/founder Drew Houston describes what it was like being one of the first companies to use Python to build a company reaching millions of users. (Another success story was YouTube, which was built by a small team using Python before being acquired by Google). Anaconda co-founder Travis Oliphant remembers Python's popularity increasing even more thanks to the data science/macine learning community. But the documentary also includes the controversial move to Python 3 (which broke compatability with earlier versions) — though ironically, one of the people slogging through a massive code migration ended up being van Rossum himself at his new job at Dropbox. The documentary also includes van Rossum's resignation as "Benevolent Dictator for Life" after approving the walrus operator. (In van Rossum's words, he essentially "rage-quit over this issue.")
>
> But the focus is on Python's community. At one point, various interviewees even take turns reciting passages from the " [3]Zen of Python " — which to this day is still hidden in Python as an import-able library as a kind of Easter Egg.
"It was a massive undertaking", the director [4]explains in a new interview , describing a full year of interviews. (The article features screenshots from the documentary — including a young Guido van Rossum and the original 1991 email that announced Python to the world.)
> [Director Bechtle] is part of a group that's filmed documentaries on everything from Kubernetes and Prometheus to Angular, Node.js, and Ruby on Rails... Originally part of the job platform Honeypot, the documentary-makers relaunched in April as Cult.Repo, promising they were "100% independent and more committed than ever to telling the human stories behind technology."
Honeypot's founder Emma Tracey [5]bought back its [6]272,000-subscriber YouTube channel from Honeypot's new owners, New Work SE, and Cult.Repo now bills itself as "The home of Open Source documentaries."
Over in [7]a thread at Python.org , language creator Guido van Rossum has identified the Python community members in the film's Monty Python-esque poster art. And core developer Hugo van Kemenade notes there's also a [8]video from EuroPython with a 55-minute Q&A about the documentary .
[1] https://youtu.be/GfH4QL4VqJ0
[2] https://www.slashdot.org/~destinyland
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_of_Python
[4] https://thenewstack.io/guido-van-rossum-revisits-pythons-life-in-a-new-documentary/
[5] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cult-repo_hello-we-are-cultrepo-today-marks-our-activity-7313150220312240128-wrT3/
[6] https://www.youtube.com/@cultrepo
[7] https://discuss.python.org/t/python-documentary-going-live-this-thursday-august-28/103319/17
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf2AqQ5a38Y&feature=youtu.be
Does it explain the "why" of pupularity. (Score:2)
TL;DW; but did it explain why particularly Python become so popular? It killed Perl (rightfully) and almost killed Javascript (Node remains) but did not become a front-end scripting.
Re: (Score:2)
Probably because you can learn the basic syntax in minutes and do something useful shortly after. With Perl and Javascript that is absolutely not the case. Also python jumps straight into its interactive mode on the command line if you don't give it a file to run whereas perl just tries to read from stdin. Yes, there is a way to make perl interactive but even I can't remember the obscure command line option to do it.
Too little meat, too much woke (Score:2)
Like most of today's media: Too little meat, too much woke.
"Honeypot's founder Emma Tracey"
Ah. That explains the unwatchable shite. "Make me a doc on the history of how men made Python, squeezing as many women in there as you can, preferably black, and make sure you spend at least 20% of the time droning on about wimmin's rights".
Re: (Score:2)
Actually it came across as trying to be a bit woke but actually managed to be incredibly patronising. The whole "Python is for girls" section seemed to have a subtext of "Aww look, finally here's a nice simple fwuffy language the girlies can understand".
And then version 3 came along in the 20-teens (Score:1)
And ruined it all. We're just finally crawling back from the 2->3 forced migration at a cost of millions of dollars. Hopefully Python devs learned not to do that again.
Python 3.0 was *not* an inevitable disaster (Score:2)
They talk about Python 3.0 as if it was an inevitable disaster.
It was not.
They (he) could have acknowledged that the Python 2 people were right and Python 2 was already too big to break, stopped 3.0 and carried on evolving 2.
He explicitly chose not to do that.
Saying "I didn't know it was the wrong thing to do, how big Python already was" might have been true at the start, but after a year it should have been obvious what the correct thing to do was, and 3.0 should have been stopped.
A proper documentary woul
It's the frameworks (Score:2)
If you are going to do code in the AI space, you are going to do it in Python. So far in the community code base that makes the current practice of AI possible I see about 95%+ is Python, then some Go, Node, C++, and Rust divide up the remainder.
When I do a project I look at what libraries and frameworks are best suited for the job. Then I use the language that those sourced software components work with. If I have to learn something new in the process I take that as a fringe benefit.
Anyone who whin
But Monty Python from long before 1991 (Score:2)
....ohhh..... _that_ Python. :sad:
"AI" is not "Python powered" (Score:1, Flamebait)
All the relevant, computationally expensive stuff around "AI" happens in libraries that are not written in Python, but rather C++ or other other compiled languages that allow to write performant software. Python just happened to be one easily accessible script language around that was adopted, for no particular reason, to string together some non computationally expensive business logic around the library calls. Which does not tell us much about Python or its qualities.