“It was a massive undertaking,” said filmmaker Ida Bechtle. Her new 84-minute documentary on Python attempts to cover 34 years in the life of the world’s most popular programming language…She’s part of a group that’s filmed documentaries on everything from Kubernetes and Prometheus to Angular, Node.js, and Ruby on Rails. After a full year of in-person Python discussions with “a rich assortment of interviewees”, Bechtle told The New Stack she hopes viewers “will appreciate all the time and effort we’ve put into it.”Just hours before her documentary’s release Thursday (10 a.m. Eastern), Bechtle added that “From the many comments on our channel it’s clear that people are very excited about it…” Originally part of the job platform Honeypot, the documentary-makers relaunched in April as Cult.Repo, promising they were “100% independent and more committed than ever to telling the human stories behind technology.”And their newest documentary begins with Python’s superstar creator himself, Guido van Rossum.He begins by telling the film’s audience that “To fully understand how Python got so big — we have to go back in time…”Guido van Rossum in 1996, is remembered as ‘a very styling person’ in the documentary — by Patrice Lyons, general counsel at van Rossum’s first U.S. employer CNRIThe Birthplace of PythonThere are photos of the Dutch research facility CWI, the birthplace of the teaching programming language ABC back in 1987. van Rossum had been hired to expand the language’s prototype — but in a world where most people didn’t own a computer, its audience was limited. The documentary-makers tracked down ABC’s creator Lambert Meertens — now 81 years old — who remembers ABC “reached very few people. And at some point the directors — for a reason that I still don’t understand — killed the project.”Van Rossum was disappointed, after three and a half years of work on the ABC language. But then a fateful new crossroads appeared.Guido was transferred to the distributed operating system, Amoeba, to write some utility applications, and thought that using C would be far too time-consuming. But he felt ABC was too abstract for OS operations like file systems and processes. “I thought ‘Well, there really ought to be a language that sort of bridges the gap between C and shell’…”“That’s how we ended up with Python.”Bugs were fixed, his other co-workers pitched in, and the documentary recreates Guido’s original announcement on a humble Usenet newsgroupThe People Who BelievedBut it seems like Python’s story is really the story of all the people who believed in it along the way. Across the Atlantic Ocean in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Ken Manheimer was working on a distributed equipment database at NIST. His colleague Michael McLay recommended Python, Manheimer loved it, and soon the two had contacted van Rossum to arrange for him to fly over from Amsterdam for a three-day conference of Python users.Guido holds up a t-shirt from that first workshop at NIST in 1994In an interview last month, Paul Everitt told The New Stack there were 20 attendees “at a windowless government office building.” As an entrepreneur who was one of Python’s early adopters (now a Python and web developer advocate at JetBrains), Everitt remembers that “The people that got Guido in that room are the unsung heroes of Python.” Because also invited to the conference was Barry Warsaw, a future Python core developer who was then working just a half hour away. Warsaw worked at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, a long-running nonprofit focused on improving network-based technologies. And as Ken Manheimer puts it in the documentary, “Part of CNRI’s mission was to cultivate internet-based things…”CNRI had been founded in 1986 by Bob Kahn, considered the co-creator of the internet for proposing (with Vint Cerf) the TCP and IP protocols. Now 86 years old, the Turing Award winner told the documentary-makers that “We had a need for a language that would be easier for people to deal with than any other traditional languages that were around.”The upshot? Guido van Rossum received a paid position at CNRI. “For me it was fantastic…” van Rossum adds. “That fact that we could work full-time on Python.”‘Everything Changes’The early-day drama continued. “Everything changes and everything evolves,” says Barry Warsaw — who a few years later joined van Rossum and Jeremy Hylton in leaving CNRI for a startup called BeOpen that was recruiting open source developers. Unfortunately, “BeOpen was completely incompetent,” remembers van Rossum. (Some archival footage finds van Rossum remembering that “We were paid our salaries every two weeks. And then suddenly in late October, we weren’t.”)But fortunately, Everitt’s company (Digital Creations, later Zope, an early player in web application servers) was in a position to hire the core Python team. As a very large-scale commercial application written in Python, Everitt says in their documentary that Zope’s motivation included some self-interest. “If Python died, you know who else would die….?”)“So we negotiated an agreement with them to join my company.” And this lays a crucial foundation for the language of today.“I put into their employment agreement that we would own none of the intellectual property for what they did on Python,” Everitt told The New Stack. (CNRI had put its name on Python’s license, and then BeOpen had done the same, van Rossum remembers in the documentary. So “There was a concern that at some point I might accidentally end up working for a company that tried to grab ownership of Python.” )This was also the moment that the nonprofit Python Software Foundation was formed to steward the language, which van Rossum says mostly “came out of one of the concerns we had had with BeOpen…”“And then,” Everitt remembers, “the magic happened when we got into PyCon.”Everitt told The New Stack that PyCon “was the real engine for change. Because it made money.” Which the Foundation then invested in community-growing projects and major infrastructure improvements.AIThe documentary also delves into the importance of Python’s early support for specialized packages like math modules for the scientific and engineering communities, with a telling comment from Peter Wang, Anaconda’s co-founder/chief AI officer.“I think one of the things that people don’t appreciate about the Python language as much now that it’s so popular and mainstream is how important it was that Guido was open to new ideas and open to the needs of people who are not traditional programmers.”Anaconda’s Peter Wang remembers that around 2010, they’d started seeing more consulting deals using Python for data processing — including well-capitalized finance firms that were attracted to more than just its low cost. Anaconda began solving a pain point after they’d learned that Python’s scientific and data libraries are often “backed by a very large amount of complex C++, Fortran, other kinds of software modules,” Wang says in the documentary — which required a lot of work to install and connect together, especially on different operating systems. Wang describes Anaconda building their one-click installer, launching conferences and their role in “building that community.”Barry Warsaw remembers these as “incredibly important contributions.” (Or, as Anaconda co-founder Travis Oliphant says, “I think we actually made Python super popular.”)van Rossum notes there’s now “an ever-growing number of scientific disciplines where all the code was written in Python, or a lot of it was prototyped in Python… And then the next step was machine learning packages, which started with TensorFlow and was later followed by PyTorch.”Python core developer Benjamin Peterson says Python probably has “centuries of engineering time that has gone into code in the ecosystem, specifically on those topics” — all available instantly in Python libraries.And NASA aerospace engineer Robin Friedrich points out “that brings yet another increment of growth to the Python community.The Largest Python 3 Migration in the World‘The documentary covers Python 3’s “breaking changes” to Python 2’s code, including an interview with Lisa Roach, the Meta production engineer who ended up leading one of the world’s largest migrations to Python 3.But there were also success stories from other big companies. Python core developer Brett Cannon remembers Instagram’s talk at PyCon was “a big deal.”And the film must inevitably grapple with what Anaconda co-founder Travis Oliphant calls “probably the most contentious language change” — the addition of the walrus operator — and how it lead to van Rossum’s resigning as the language’s single overseer.The community was left to itself, remembers Brett Cannon, where “The first order of business was deciding on how to decide.” But Everitt says the five-person council that emerged drew legitimacy from the fact that it sprang up from the community.And as Warsaw says, “You have to be willing to evolve… You have to be ready and willing to adapt to change.”A Long, Strange TripToward the end of the movie, core developer Benjamin Peterson seems to look back on what a long strange trip it’s been. Guido van Rossum “spent two weeks at Christmas in 1989 writing a programming language, because he thought it would be fun…” Peterson marvels. “Who would’ve imagined that that would be such a life-altering — and also world-altering — thing to have done?”Now the story has been captured in an 84-minute documentary. As filmmaker Ida Bechtle told me, “It feels great to finally release the Python documentary to the world.”And Cult.Repo is now promising future documentaries about Vite (premiering Oct. 9 in Amsterdam) and C++.The post Guido van Rossum Revisits Python’s Life in a New Documentary appeared first on The New Stack.