[Python-Dev] Looking for Memories of Python Old-Timers (original) (raw)

Sean Reifschneider jafo-python-dev at tummy.com
Tue May 23 12:07:13 CEST 2006

2006/5/23, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org>:

How long have you used Python? 10 years or longer? Please tell us how you first heard of the language, how you first used it, and how you helped develop it (if you did). More recent reminiscences are welcome too!

I'm almost at the 10 year mark now. I'll just blab a bit.

I'm a C guy from way back. Back in the '80s I liked C, but by the mid-90s I was pretty tired of working at such a low level, having to do so much code to do string manipulations, having to cut-and-paste code for getting dynamic list code, etc... I liked that C was small and I could hold it all in my head, but it was just too low-level.

The problem was that I was starting to lose my immortality. As I grew older I just wanted to be more productive so I'd spend less time doing the same damn thing over and over just to make progress.

Because I liked C, I really wanted C++ to be an option. In 1995 I tried out C++, but the compilers and environment then were extremely immature. Templates were horrible. I spent about 6 to 9 months giving it the "college-try". It just wasn't workable then though.

Next I tried Perl, another 6 to 9 months. It made me realize that a "scripting language" could be fast enough for much of what I was doing, and the POSIX-like API was very familiar to my C and Unix background. However, I never got comfortable with Perl, just passing lists to functions never seemed to work the way I expected.

Then I tried Java, only for about 3 months. I mostly liked the language, though it was much to "object-centric" for my taste. By that, I mean even a simple "hello world" program HAS to be an object. My biggest complaint was that in 1997, Java under Linux was in a horrible state. Long running processes would leak horribly, compiling was slow even on my mighty, mighty dual PPro 200 box, and anything I wrote in Java was 32MB of RAM just to start, even without the memory leaking.

A friend of mine, John Shipman, mentioned right around then that he was learning Python and really liking it. I took a look at it shortly after Evelyn and I moved to our new house in 1998.

Python was everything I had wanted C++ to be. Like C, it was simple and easy to keep in my head. It had a rich library, which appealed to my desires for having to write less code. It was operating at such a high level that I felt productive.

I was working with an ISP at the time, and there was this Perl application that generated accounting reports of dial-in user activity. It had bugs where it would generate slightly or sometimes vastly wrong data. Worse, it used RAM for holding all the data to generate the accounting. It was pretty easy to fill up all the memory for even small or medium ISPs records.

My first program was a re-implementation of the Perl program, with fewer bugs. I also used the shelve library to keep the accounting data out of RAM. It worked brilliantly.

Mostly I haven't done as much development as I would like. I built a lot of the Python RPMs for Linux, which is my primary contribution. I also have done some documentation changes and have added the string.rfind() methods. I've done a few things on pydotorg for the web-site, including sprinting on the new site at PyCon.

Sean

The price of freedom is responsibility, but it's a bargain because freedom is priceless. -- Hugh Downs Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com> tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability

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