Interesting film here: The Story of Python and how it took over the world | Python: The Documentary
There’s plenty of drama in the story of Python. And it wasn’t especially obvious early on that Python would survive, but all these years later Python still thrives. It’s a cool story. It’s a story of highly skilled software developers — craftsmen — gathering together and somehow collaborating and build something of value interesting that lasts for decades. When groups start out small, they can gel relatively easily. But when things scale globally across entire corporate economies are involved then that’s a different game altogether. That’s the most interesting bit to me about Open Source development communities.
Toward the end of the film, we get this dramatic scene here: On a morning in 2018, Guido van Rossum woke up, checked his email, and felt angry and miserable. The creator of Python then simply sat down at his computer and drafted a short email that would shake the Python community to its core and shock developers around the world. He wrote his resignation as Benevolent Dictator for Life — then he hit send. That last part is critical. I’ve written many such emails but never hit send. I’d love try it some day. It’s on my bucket list. “That had an incredible impact because nobody had expected I would resign,” Guido said, “and certainly not that I would rage quit over this issue, which essentially it was.” Even more interesting was how short and precise that email was. I loved it. It must have been such a relief. The issue over Guido’s quitting was the Walrus operator, which some developers considered a relatively minor syntax change and one that offered some real value. But many others didn’t hold that opinion. And in large groups, that matter. A lot.
The resulting controversy around PEP 572 led to some impressive flame wars and revealed something deeper about Python and the community that had grown around it over thirty years. But that dynamic isn’t unique to Python. It’s pervasive across many large Open Source projects. I’ve never had anything to do with Python but everything in this film seemed totally familiar to me. It’s a real issue and it’s not solvable. It’s just normal human behavior. Anyway, give the film a watch. It’s good.