New Python Documentary Released On YouTube (youtube.com) 46
"From a side project in Amsterdam to powering AI at the world's biggest companies — this is the story of Python," says the description of a new 84-minute documentary.
Long-time Slashdot reader 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 "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 documentary's director 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 bought back its 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 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 video from EuroPython with a 55-minute Q&A about the documentary.
Long-time Slashdot reader 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 "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 documentary's director 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 bought back its 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 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 video from EuroPython with a 55-minute Q&A about the documentary.
Re: (Score:1)
remember when trolls tried to be funny instead of weird little degenerate freaks (I'm talking about you)
"AI" is not "Python powered" (Score:2, Flamebait)
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for no particular reason
Which would you rather they have chosen? Node.js? Ruby? Perl? I prefer ruby and even still have a fondness for perl but completely understand why python was chosen for things like pytorch et cetera... Python even in 2016 had a better ecosystem than ruby or perl and less nonsense than node.js.
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Which would you rather they have chosen?
I'm not saying that any particular script language would have been much better for the purpose, but any other could also have been used to implement the not-performance critical glue code around the "AI"-libraries that popped up. I write both Python and C++ code myself where I deem them to be the right tool, but if the early users of "AI"-libraries had opted to use Ruby, for example, to run their experiments, today we could just as well have a hype around Ruby, even though nothing makes it special in any wa
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Hey, if you don't like AI, you should be happy they rely on python so much... since it means things are slower than they otherwise would be.
Re: "AI" is not "Python powered" (Score:2)
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Python *is* a (runtime) compiled language.
Not like you can tell, though, since it's 3-4 times slower than Perl.
It can in fact use libraries written in other languages
Like every other popular language, yes.
Re: "AI" is not "Python powered" (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Did you actually have anything to add to the conversation
That's what I did, yes.
or was your post just agreeing I am right
Would that be terrible?
while implying I claimed better performance
Which words do you imagine did that?
when I definitely didn't do that?
I definitely didn't do what you think I did.
Re: "AI" is not "Python powered" (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you go now little troll ...
You don't even know what a troll is. Try not using words you don't understand.
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:3, Interesting)
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.
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Posting anon since I've modded...
Having used both Python and Perl, I'd suggest the difficulty in learning either one depends on which you learned first, because you end up mentally trying to translate how to do something that you would have done in your first language ... and of course the 2 languages do several things quite differently. I learned Perl first and picked up the basics in an hour or two, probably because I had a background with C, Bash, & Sed ... Perl's ancestors. Learning Python took a co
Re: Does it explain the "why" of pupularity. (Score:2)
I learned C, perl, C++, Python in that order and I find oython way easier to use than perls line noise with is cretinous punctuation notifiers of var types amongst other things. And if you dont think being able to type stuff direct into an interactive command line to test stuff out is useful then I'm not sure you're a genuine dev frankly. Maybe devops is more you bag.
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I wouldn't say Python killed Perl - never mind "rightfully". Perl committed seppuku when they announced Perl 6, had a committee design a whole different language, and work on it for years, so people thought if they learned Perl 5, it would not translate into Perl 6, waited for Perl 6 for a bit but that was not happening, so the language sort of appeared in limbo/dead. It was many years later when Perl 6 was renamed to Raku to make it clear is a whole different language than Perl 5 (which continues to be upd
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Ok, "killed" is too strong, fine, so rather "displaced"?
But "rightfully" was a tribute the Perl's syntax being heavily punctuation based and with rampant plurality - the same thing can be expressed multiple ways. This did not help withe ease of use and maintainability, hence "rightfully". (At may old age I am starting to favor "verbosity" over "expressiveness". Perl always looked like "assembly" of scripting languages.)
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Though one thing I really miss from Perl (in Python) is regex being part of the language rather than a library. This was very useful in Perl.
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Really? I only watched the first couple of minutes (I found it dull) and saw nothing but white men. No Americans though, I suppose that might upset you too.
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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:2)
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.
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Under that attitude we still use IE 6 and vbscript because why change and not have hTML 5 today. Times move on
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Surely you're not saying the 2->3 rollout was smooth, Bill?
Python 3.0 was *not* an inevitable disaster (Score:4, Interesting)
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 would have made addressed that.
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Yeah, Python took the wrong lesson from C's operator precedence mistake [lysator.liu.se].
It's the frameworks (Score:5, Insightful)
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 whines in comment forums about white space or some syntax feature is a loser.
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If you are going to do code in the AI space, you are going to do it in Python.
If you are going to do code in the AI space, you are going to glue it together in Python. All of the heavy lifting is done in something else. Look at those projects by lines of code and the Python is infinitesimal compared to the things pulled into it.
Anyone who whines in comment forums about white space or some syntax feature is a loser.
Welcome to Slashdot, I see from your UID that you are noob here.
Re: (Score:2)
Welcome to Slashdot, I see from your UID that you are noob here.
I've been commenting here for more than a decade. I never aspired to be a founding member. Nor cared to be particularly active.
Anyone who thinks that a low number UID on this site is some sort of meritorious achievement is pathetic.
But Monty Python from long before 1991 (Score:3)
....ohhh..... _that_ Python. :sad:
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Watched it last (Score:2)
And now for something completely different (Score:2)
...it's
Wow, a documentary about a scripting language (Score:3)
I bet it's riveting viewing. Too bad they didn't make one about perl - I really want to know what Larry Wall eats for breakfast.
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I really want to know what Larry Wall eats for breakfast.
A variety of different hashes.
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You win the internet for today!
I'm lazy this morning (Score:2)
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
I was wondering what that "one line of code" was, but Google didn't give an immediate answer. Anyone know that answer for someone too lazy to dig for it before breakfast?
"From a side project in Amsterdam to powering AI.. (Score:2)
..this is the story of Python,"
So that's why AI uses up so much power!
I was going make a smart ____ comment , but... (Score:2)
But then I remembered I sat thru a documentary on fonts... Helvetica [youtu.be]...