The History of Python | Hacker News Reader

The History of Python

python-history.blogspot.com

65 pointsbockris11 comments

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

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"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.

See also Guido's introductory announcement for this post. http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/01/history-of-python-in...

One of the comments is good. Basically, it asks, why the need for semicolons at all?

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.

And you can put two or more commands on one line.

I use them for this purpose in both Python and Ruby when there's a formatting win to be had.

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.

In this case you could just use:

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

I do not know whether that was a good example to show the benefits of the semicolon:

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

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()"

Now that I look in my code I actually have:

    import matplotlib; matplotlib.use('Agg'); from matplotlib import pyplot

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