![]() A good example of this is his blog post on the inclusion of user-defined classes where he admits that he added multiple inheritance without thinking much about the consequences of that design, and even calls himself “fairly naïve about classes” at the time. But to say that he had a plan from Day 1 is a stretch. In truth, it’s hard to overrate Guido’s initial taste and insight about what makes Python tick. Python users liked to say that Guido had a time machine since every now and again it seemed like he created a feature in the past for a need that has just arisen much later. Of course, the notion of having a comprehensive, consciously laid out plan that Guido and his early contributors followed when creating Python was at best aspirational. It was a contributing factor to Python’s rise in prominence. I think for that alone the Zen of Python should be considered an important artifact in Python’s history. Here was a community that apparently had a cohesive idea about what computing should look like and how it should feel like. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in this, the existence of the Zen of Python and discussions on what’s Pythonic were both very attractive to newcomers. ![]() At the time that authority was very obviously Java, in fact the original thread the Zen appeared in was a discussion about rewriting Python in Java.Īt the time to me the theses in Zen of Python read like a manifesto: a declaration of rebellion against boilerplate, rigid structures, corporate overlords, lengthy compilation steps, you name it. It felt both like a design statement and a Martin Luther-style “95 theses” challenging the authority. A Sense of CohesionĪlthough the Zen was always somewhat of a joke, and it was created almost a decade after the first public version of Python saw the light of day, I was fascinated by it when I discovered it and took it very seriously. The Zen was originally posted on the newsgroup in June 1999, to be later extracted as PEP 20 and even a CPython interpreter Easter egg: import this. It’s a typical example of Tim’s wit and insight. It’s a set of aphorisms by Tim Peters that summarize some fundamental idiomatic recommendations within the spirit of the Python programming language. What changed since then? What’s “Zen of Python” anyway? The first entry was called “The Zen of Python and Me” where I went through each of the koans and explained what it meant to my day-to-day Python programming. There used to be a different blog here which I started in March 2012. ![]() Books Lifestyle Movies Music Philosophy Programming RPLKTR # Zen of Python, Again
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