Barry Warsaw
Posts: 12
Nickname: pumpichank
Registered: Jun, 2003
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Re: Looking for Memories of Python Old-Timers
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Posted: May 23, 2006 6:14 AM
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I think I first heard about Python when the newsgroup comp.lang.python got created. I remember reading it for a while thinking, all these great Monty Python quotes were pretty funny, but why is this in comp.lang?!
Later, I joined CNRI to work on mobile agents and we settled on Objective-C on the NeXTs to do the work. Pretty soon after that Guido was giving his talk at NIST (the "first Python conference") and as I used to work there, still had friends there, and it was only a few miles away, I went with co-worker Roj.
We got to meet Guido, Jim, Paul and lots of the other early(er than us) adopters. IIRC, docstrings were the hot topic! The more we learned about Python the more we loved it (myself especially, having come from a fairly strong Tcl, Perl, C, C++ background). We were interested in some of the Python/Objective-C work and thought it would be really cool if we could use Python in this way for our research.
My own recollection is that a coworker of ours suggested that we should try to hire Guido, ostensibly to integrate Python and ObjC. As luck would have it, Guido wanted to come to the US and the rest is history. The best part is that Guido pretty quickly disavowed us of the need for ObjC at all, since it could all be done in Python (big surprise that he was right? :).
Anyway, those are my undoubtably faulty memories of my early days with Python. I've been fortunate enough to use it almost daily since probably late 1994, and to have worked with Guido and other smart Pythoneers in those early days.
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