Tim Peters, one of Python’s earliest and most influential contributors, died July 15 at 74, Slashdot reports, pointing to an Adafruit remembrance. The news is only now getting around.
- He wrote the Zen of Python, PEP 20. Type
import thisand you’ll still see it. - In 2002 he gave Python Timsort, which Java and Android later adopted.
- He worked on the cyclic garbage collector, pymalloc, dicts, floats and the math module, and wrote the first doctest, plus difflib, pickletools and tabnanny.
- He was a PSF director from 2001 to 2014. Before Python he wrote compilers at Cray and speech-to-text software at Dragon Systems.
Guido van Rossum wrote that “it’s hard to overestimate Tim’s influence on Python… to me he was a mentor and language co-designer long before that.”
My take
I’ve lived by “explicit is better than implicit” and “errors should never pass silently” in a lot more languages than Python. Those 19 lines shaped how a whole generation of us thinks about code. Rest well, Tim. Go type import this today.
God Bless, and Use the Source!
