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The History of Python (python-history.blogspot.com)

65 points by bockris ↗ HN
Python is 19 years old and Guido Van Rossum is starting a new blog on the history of the language. Here is the from his regular blog that announces it. http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/01/history-of-python-introduction.html

11 comments

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stcredzero
"The ABC group wanted to isolate the user, as completely as possible, from the big, bad world of computers...ABC should be the only tool they ever needed. This desire also caused the ABC group to create a complete integrated editing environment, unique to ABC"

The problem with this design choice, is that it isolates you from the rest of the software ecosystem. This is why PHP became part of the LAMP stack and why Smalltalk became isolated and esoteric. In this sense, Perl, Ruby, and Python all made a beneficial choice to be good citizens in the Unix-like space.

PieSquared
One of the comments is good. Basically, it asks, why the need for semicolons at all?
johnrob
Probably to make it easier for programmers who end lines with them as a knee jerk reaction. After a stint of java or javascript, I find myself doing it too.
eru
And you can put two or more commands on one line.
blasdel
I use them for this purpose in both Python and Ruby when there's a formatting win to be had.
gaius
Yeah. Often it's bad style, but IMHO if you just need to do something like:

    x = 0; y = []; z = None
Then it is actually clearer to group them together, it means more "real code" on screen at a time.
eru
I do not know whether that was a good example to show the benefits of the semicolon:

    x, y, z = 0, [], None
lehmannro
While the semicolon is only a convenience it has some common use cases. For example shoot-and-forget invokations of third party modules:

  import sys; sys.exit()
  import pdb; pdb.set_trace()
  import cgitb; cgitb.enable()
  import psyco; psyco.full()
  import pygtk; pygtk.require('2.0')
And of course it's pretty useful in environments where one-liner are easier to handle:

  $ python -c "import mymod; mymod.test()"
gaius
Now that I look in my code I actually have:

    import matplotlib; matplotlib.use('Agg'); from matplotlib import pyplot
ulf
In this case you could just use:

x, y, z = 0, [], None