When it first launched in 1991, Python “wasn’t lucrative,” remembers long-time Python community organizer Paul Everitt (now a Python and web developer advocate at JetBrains). “But we believed in it. The passion was there — we were doing good in the world.”
Yet surprisingly, Python traveled a bumpy early road on its way to becoming the world’s #1 most popular programming language, safely ensconced in the nonprofit Python Software Foundation that would help it grow through the years.
It’s a story Everitt will share in a soon-to-be-released documentary from Cult.Repo (formerly part of the tech-focused job platform Honeypot).
“We get so attracted to Python’s success,” Everitt told me this week — but what’s overlooked is “the story of the people, and the story of the Foundation, the story of what did happen and what didn’t happen.”
There’s passion, some trial and error, and a few truly hair-raising near misses. But what comes through is the message that community matters — and that a community’s values really can make a difference.
The Birth of a Community
After distributing Python for years through Usenet newsgroups, Python creator Guido van Rossum attended a breakthrough in-person meeting in 1994. “Obviously, we were emailing each other,” Everitt remembers, “but there was this physical event — 20 people, Gaithersburg, Maryland — at a windowless government office building.
“That’s when the community started,” he says with fondness in his voice. “As something separate from the language.”
It was at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Everitt laughs, remembering how it had seemed like such an abundance of space — in light of how massive the Python conferences became later.
“The people that got Guido in that room are the unsung heroes of Python,” Everitt says — future Python core developer Barry Warsaw and Michael McLay, then a NIST electronics engineer. Because they’d ultimately get van Rossum a job at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives — the long-running nonprofit (founded in 1986) focused on public-interest projects improving the world’s network-based technologies. Everitt remembers this as the beginning of “the engine that powered” Python’s early days — “Guido and team at CNRI, working for Bob Kahn, the co-creator of the internet!”
... continue reading