 I've always said that EuroPython is my favorite conference, better talks, better people, this is me sucking up to you, better locations, no offense Cleveland or Pittsburgh, but Basel? Really? Like last night my colleague Lisa got four of us to go swim in the river. Would you swim in the river in Cleveland? You'd have to get vaccinated first, I think, and maybe sign a legal waiver, but EuroPython has been going on for 18 years. Before I tell my story about the first Python event, let's talk a little bit about EuroPython and its first event. First, this is the who's older than Paul check, raise your hand. If you were at EuroPython 1, 2002, and Charlois, 1, 2, 3, EuroPython 1, not EuroPython 2? Okay, maybe, all right, yeah, anyone else? Charlois, how about that? So I've got a funny story about, well actually before that, EuroPython Society puts in all the work to do this conference. All we have to do is show up and complain. Raise your hand if you are an organizer for the society or the conference. Anyone from the conference or society here? All right, we'll give them a round of applause. So my funny story about the first EuroPython is Charlois. I think like July 2002, June or July 2002, and I was in the process of moving to Europe, moving to live in France for four years. And I went up to go meet Denis Frère, the organizer of the conference at his office. Was it Ariadne? Was that the name of his company? Anybody know Denis? And he had two people working for him. One a Dutch Belgian and one a French Belgian, good for. And they both knew the other language. Goethoi knew Dutch, Jean-Paul knew French, but they spoke to each other in English. And that was my indoctrination into the world of Europe. Okay, we're going to have a little bit of fun today. Thank you to the EuroPython Society for mistakenly selecting my talk. This is not so much a talk, this is a dialogue. We'll talk a little bit about the format. But your job is to have fun in this conference. So transport yourself back. It's November 1994. When I give this talk, I used to make the mistake of saying, what were you doing in 1994? And half the audience was waiting to be conceived. So I stopped saying that. There was a Clinton in the White House. What happened? Did he just die? Has he been dead the whole time? He's waiting to be conceived. Let's see if it's full screen that kills it. It's November 1994. There's a Clinton in the White House. This slide was a lot funnier in August 2016 when I first wrote it. Joke's on me. Number one movie of the year? I make no statements about the quality of American cinema. And there was a way to order freaking books on the internet. You fired up NCSA Mosaic. You connected to maybe AOL. And you got HTML 3.2 in all of its nested table glory. This might have been pre-tables. Amazon done pretty well since then. And the Python community started. And what do we mean when we say the Python community started? It wasn't the Python started, but the community started. Because there was a workshop at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. A windowless, bureaucratic, Stalin-esque office building with room for 20 people. And we thought, what are we going to do with all that space? And a number of people that were on the mailing list had a workshop in November of 1994. This talk is intended to be a conversation that's a little bit unusual in this room. But my job is to entertain you. My job is not to inform you. Because I don't do that very well. My job is just to make you laugh. Your job is to entertain me. Otherwise I'll get bored and we'll wrap this up quickly. I gave this talk in 10 minutes with Barry at PyCon. I gave it in two and a half hours with the PyCharm team in St. Petersburg. That was a fun version because by the end I achieved Speaker Nirvana. Everybody was talking to each other in the last 30 minutes I watched. If you have something useful to say, something important and educational, say it anyway. You don't have to go over to here. Just raise your hand, stand up and say something. It can be true. It can be false. That's not important in this talk. But it needs to be funny. I've done a few things. I have the best job in the world. I'm a developer advocate at PyCharm. I should be paying them instead of them paying me. But I've been in the room when some important things happened. Let's talk about life in Python before 1994. Raise your hand if you were using Python in 1994. Damn! All right. Some of you may have read Guido's blog about the start of Python. He was on the ABC team at CWI in the Netherlands. That team got disbanded because none of the 20 users of the language wanted it to continue, I guess. He took some of the lessons and decided to make his own language and the secret to success was the internet started to exist. If the internet would have started to exist when ABC was created and they would have put an open source license on it, then we may be using ABC right now. But Guido had spent a couple of years working on Python and distributing it and leading into the year of 1994. This was the landscape then. It's interesting. Do you use the word scripting language anymore? It's not used as much. Back then, these were the big fish in the world of scripting languages. Perl, the right once language. Tickle TK, which probably a lot of you have never heard of. Python were lumped into this category of scripting language. And it was a pejorative. It was a way for serious people to look down their nose at that silly little toy. Sure, you can write your thing in Python. But then the grown-ups will show up and we'll convert it to C++. That story obviously didn't last very long. Again, this talk is a thin excuse for telling a bunch of stories. Funny story about that book cover. This was the first Python book. Guido participated in the writing of it. And they needed some cover art. And my company had a graphic designer who didn't know anything about programming. And so they said, hey, can you get her to do a logo? I was like, sure. And I went over to Nancy. I was like, Nancy, what should the logo be? And I'm like, I don't know. I'm like a snake and a can of spam. And maybe some glasses that look like Guido. So I embarrassingly am responsible for that horrific book cover art. Another little story about Pearl. This is a Guido story. A number of years later, Guido was sitting at a dinner table with Larry Wall and Tom Christensen and some other people from the Pearl Language, some kind of cross-language summit. And someone wanted to needle Larry Wall, the creator of Pearl, about Python's success. And he made some derisive... No, and Guido's like right there. Made some derisive comment about Python's a toy that will never last. A little story on how I got to that conference. 1992, I was an officer in the Navy getting paid to go shark fishing. In 1985, the movie Top Gun came out. The Navy didn't realize five years later they would have 100,000 people trying to start flight school, so I got paid for shark fishing. And I was working for a guy who called himself the Navy Internet Manager, which is like, what the hell is that? And the guy sitting in the cubicle next to me ran the domain for Navy.mil. And I leaned over and I was like, I did this. Hey, Mike, can I have www.navy.mil? He's like, what's that? Well, it's going to be the next big thing after Gopher. So I started working on that and I needed a scripting language. And I knew programming if you think Debase is programming and Clipper. So I knew programming. And I went to the bookstore, and I was in the computer section, and I was looking through books and I'd heard about Pearl and everybody that was extended... This was pre-CGI. Everybody that was extending their web servers was using Pearl. So I got this book on Pearl and I'm like, hmm. Oh, hell no. And then found out that Python had a downloadable printable tutorial that was genetically written for Paul Everett. It was like Guido knew how to infect my brain in a very particular fashion. And I actually... Yeah, I printed that and took my 286 laptop to go visit someone I was dating in France and went through the tutorial in her kitchen. And she married me anyway. So I had been using Python for a while and there was talk on the mailing list about going to organize a workshop because Guido was going to be in town. And Guido was invited over by the secret unknown superhero of the world of Python, Michael McLey at NIST, got Guido over on a guest researcher visa, had this workshop invited people in. At the workshop, he met Barry and Roger and Jeremy... No, just Barry and Roger from CNRI who would later employ Guido during the takeoff of Python. So Michael was really responsible for a number of things, including making it all happen. So Guido arrives at this conference, meets the various people including his future employers. At that time, the community, whatever that meant, the Python community was a mailing list. And you got on the mailing... Actually, I should tell a funny story. I'm going to say this a lot, a funny story. Back in the 1993 timeframe when we did www.navy.mil, there was a web page at CERN with the web servers on the Internet. And you got listed on the web by emailing Tim Berners-Lee. And so I was like, hey, Tim, could you link to my site? Love, Paul. And so we had one of, you know, it was like 200 web... You could print the web at that time. And the same thing for the Python mailing list, Guido administered an Etsy aliases file and whenever someone wanted to join the community, he had to go edit that damn thing and do all the magic to make the mail server work. Guido knew that there was a successful Python community when he could hand that task over to somebody else. And then he has another funny story about that. He and Barry talk about they put in... Or someone put in the gateway to comp-laying Python news group, which probably means nothing to any of you. There was this thing called news groups. And despite the comp and the laying in the damn title of the news group, all the messages were about Monty Python. So this is the beginning of kind of the Python community. This is Guido's first email to the Python mailing list. Tells a little bit about the Python mailing list, how to subscribe, send messages and stuff like that. Isn't that cute? Guido introducing you to the Python community. The second message explains how comments work. Okay, you put a little indent things and then, you know, make sure it wraps correctly and that's how we talk to each other. I was talking about the NNTP gateway, so this is a little explanation of that in mailing lists and things. Let's do a test. That arrow points to two different acronyms. Raise your hand if you know what POTS is. That is amazing. For the record, less than 10% of the hands went up. Raise your hand if you know what UUCP stands for. What does it stand for? Raise your hand again. Yes, UNIX to UNIX copy. All right. You get a free ticket to my next talk. This is my first email to the Python mailing list. Anybody that knows me from the... Okay, this next one, I stopped asking this question like a decade ago at PyCon DE gave a keynote, asked the question, got the answer, filed away the lesson, never asked that question again. Raise your hand if you've ever heard of Zope. For the record, 100% of the hands went up. Anybody that knows me from the Zope days will think that this is funny as shit. The very first thing I ever talk about is persisting Python objects. This was kind of going into the workshop, coming out of the workshop, the milieu that we existed in. What was the industry like? Remember, ask questions, please, funny stories. Just stand up and say something. The milieu that we existed in for scripting languages meant that 107% of the emails were asking us, how do you compare to Tickle? How do you compare to, you know, TK or Perl or something like that? Raise your hand if you know what Tickle stands for. Ooh. That's a half-hearted hand raise. You want to take a chance at it? I think you're sort of right. Tool command language. You said tool chain command language. I gave you credit for that, tool command language. Raise your hand if you've ever written any Tickle. Raise your hand if you've ever used TK Enter in the standard library. Okay, you've written Tickle, not knowing that you did. Raise your hand if you think TK Enter looks good. So this was kind of the milieu that we existed in and it still was framing us and framing all of these languages kind of in the toy section and then with the advent of Java, which is essentially a systems language, the grown-ups had a very powerful tool to beat us over the hedgewood. I'll tell the Java story in just a second. But needless to say, the joke that can power Instagram and Dropbox is no longer a toy, right? In fact, okay, another funny story. I think this is a Guido story, maybe, or a Barry. Google. Raise your hand if you've heard of Google. Just kidding. Google has some money, right? The joke at Google is there's this one computer in the corner that serves the ads that makes 99% of the money. So Google has a team of 100 people making this product called Google Video. All right? And I'm sure all of you use this every day, right now. But they use C++. And some of the PayPal refugees, too, I believe, had this website called YouTube, which was kicking their ass and rolling out a feature a week that would take like six months of the 100 grown-ups over at Google. So Google just bought them and rebranded it. But that idea of the grown-ups versus the toy language was very predominant at this time as someone who had to sell Python. In fact, the original sin of Zope and its commercial application server that came before... I'll tell a funny story about that. That came before that was we were intentionally hiding Python. You could go into web browser, write stuff, and didn't know that you were going Python. So is it okay if I tell a funny story? Yeah. So it's like 1996, 97, 96 and 97. We were making our money by selling an application server to the Navy, $20,000. Now you may have remembered that a couple of years before that I was in the Navy running the website, and then I left the Navy and became a consultant to get paid to... That's not corrupt. I just thought I would throw that in there. And for $20,000, you got a three-and-a-half inch floppy. And I was like, doesn't feel like $20,000. Let's put it on a CD. So we put it on a CD. It was 99.9% empty. I kind of filled that up a little bit. So let's take all the docs, and this next part of the story may or may not be true. Just pretend it is. Gzip, or zip at the time, has some command line options. Maybe you know of them. Zip minus nine, what does that do? Extra strong compression. Makes your stuff smaller. Takes longer to run, but makes your stuff smaller. What does zip plus nine do? You know what it does? $20,000. You run that, and then rerun it, and rerun it, you got $20,000. So again, coming out of the conference, we had a community which meant that we needed to start thinking about things like the long-term, 24 months at that point. And there was a conversation. Many of you may have heard this conversation about Guido getting hit by a bus. This email is the origin of it by Michael McLeod, the unsung hero. And I think the feeling was kind of that if Guido got hit by a bus, Jim Folton, who later came to work with me, was going to be the benevolent dictator for life. But as a community, as you start growing, you have to start thinking about things like that. And I went to go visit Guido at Google like 10 years ago when he was on the App Engine team, I think it's 10 years ago. And even at that point, I gave him credit because he was able to do something that just about every other open source project fails at. What happens when the founder starts to move away a little bit? He hadn't left, but others were starting to carry the load and one could imagine at that point life after Guido. So going into all this, Guido and Michael organized a workshop at NIST a little bit less deluxe than this environment. These were some of the topics before the conference. Hey, this is what the vast audience will talk about. Read through this list. You have one that is still an itch that you would like to see Python scratch. Some of these are pretty funny. Some of them are tragic and funny in a tragic and pathetic kind of way. A couple of them are funny for me. Item number 11, Michael McLean and I spent our time at the workshop. The only contribution I had at the workshop was to say, hey, you know, those doc strings could contain information. Of course, I wanted to put like a dick in there, but later on that became a thing. But Michael McLean and I spent time talking about formalizing the world of Python, the community of Python. And if there is a point to this talk, this is it, which is don't do that. Way premature. We wrote bylaws. How stupid. It's like a Monty Python skit. Way premature for that. Okay, so anyway, raise your hand if you have something on this list that you think is still a burning issue in the world of Python. Anybody got one? I've already gotten you, so you here in the blue. Got a funny story about that. But I'll come back. Yes. So same one. Yep. Okay. Anybody else got one? All right. I'll go with the gooey thing. The gooey thing. I got a funny story about that. Anybody got another one? Number four. Number four? Oh, all right. It's interesting because like it, the conferences at that time were called spam one, spam two. They weren't called PyCon. And like spam three, spam three at Reston was when that community in David Asher, I think, started to get organized a little bit. The numeric people, the scientific people and stuff like that. Anybody else got one that they feel really strongly about? Somebody towards the back so you can yell out. All right. So funny story, which might lead to another funny story. No. Same funny story. Okay. This one I never said in public. Barry tells a story that Netscape was looking around for a scripting language for the browser. Contact a Guido. No. Yeah. It's as if millions of voices cried out at once. And said, HTML is an HTML language. White space isn't significant. We need either semicolons or braces. Think about it. Better yet, don't think about it. Pictures from the first workshop. Top left. That's Guido in the middle. Isn't he so cute? Talking to Roger Massey and Barry. Robin Friedrich in the middle on the top. Was doing Python at NASA. Like real NASA. Space command thing NASA. In 1994. Later had a pretty big role in the organization of the Python community. My man Jim Fulton on the top right. Not the bus driver. But perhaps the replacement. Bottom left. This is a picture of what Barry Warsaw looks like on the inside. And then me, before I got married and learned, you can spend more than $5 on a haircut. Yes. I spent years asking the question, what is orange bovin? Raise your hand if you know what. Say it again. Orange bovin. Orange bovin is. Anybody know what orange bovin is? The Dutch people know. You can make up a story and people would believe it. It's the Python secret underground. What was the conference like? It didn't feel like all that much. But it did feel like something. Hard to look back on something and subject the biases. How am I doing on time? I have no idea. Got ten minutes? Lunch wasn't all that good yesterday. What was it like? It felt like something was happening. Something important. But being so new at the game, we didn't really foresee even the coming five years, much less the coming 20 years. After this workshop, what did things look like a little bit? Endless discussions about where we stack up in the scripting language universe. There was a second workshop. Spam 2 at Menlo Park. Is that right? USGS Menlo Park. Jim Folton organized that one and the third one at Reston. This one was at a windowless government office building at USGS with metal chairs. And the attendees included a guy from Sun's Set Top Box programming language team. Anybody know what that became? Java. Didn't have the word Java on it at the time. Also had two guys showing their Python implementation at the Stanford Digital Library project. Anybody know the name of that? I'll give you a hint. You could Google it. Things got a little bit bigger. So we organized the predecessor of the Python Software Foundation called the Python Software Activity. Guido was at CNRI at the time. CNRI was kind of the home of it. Lots of funny stories about that. By the way, if you want an infinity of funny stories, I'll be at the PyCharm booth and I can tell the stories that can't be recorded. Like this one. We started some formalisms, the predecessors of PEPs called special interest groups. I had the unique distinction of creating the first special interest group, the catalog signal, which I think later taken on by Andrew Kuchling, which went nowhere. This is the other part about the embedded client. Guido at CNRI, Corporation for National Research Initiatives, was on a team doing mobile code in Python on the internet, including a web browser written in Python and TKNR, called Grail. There was a third workshop. This is the agenda for it. I have the special interest group called the locator. This is also the workshop where I have a funny story that I was doing a CGI workshop. In the audience were Greg Stein and someone else from his company, eShop, who was using our software that put a Corba thing into the NCSA web server and talked Corba over to a long running Python process so he didn't pay the CGI startup costs. Six months later, he sold that damn thing to Microsoft and it was Microsoft commerce server, version one had Python inside of it. How about that? Oh, I'm on time, cool. We're not yet at the best two words of any presentation in conclusion. We're not at that point yet. This is questions and answers. Please get up and ask some questions. I'll help you by asking a question. In an attempt to pretend this is informative, what could you learn from the first workshop that started the community in Python 1994? In particular, Python in its first third had a reputation as being friendly. Being really friendly. Others? Not so much. A lot of the other online communities quite hostile. Why Python? Why friendly? Jim Fulton had a good explanation of this. We did this talk as a keynote panel, two or three Pythons together, and he said Python is friendly and human because Guido is friendly and human. And everyone agrees with that. It didn't have to be that way. It could have been toxic like some other cultures. Why did Python succeed and its competitors fail? Because at that workshop we put together a highly detailed strategic plan, budget, marketing, resource allocation. Luck? Randomness? It's a good question, and the lack of an answer is instructive. If you are making the next Python, if you're making the next big thing, remember to just work hard, treat people right, and success will surely follow 1% of the time. Any actual questions? Yes? Samuel? You are loud enough, and I'll repeat it. Mission accomplished. So to repeat the question, Samuel lauded my highly researched and detailed presentation and then went on to a question about where would you look today for a similar community? I will cheat and say Python. And here's my point. In Python I like the first third, second third, first third, the last third. First third is what I'm talking about here. Second third was like the rise of Python, the glory years, the PSF getting organized, and especially Python becoming a financial engine to accomplish missions including the last third. Why do you think Python has gotten really big? I asked this at St. Petersburg. It's really taken off in the last five years. We don't have time to do an audience survey. Thanks. So I'll tell you what you think. Your first thought is data science, right? So you could call that another thing. It's almost like another thing that has the same values and lack of toxicity and stuff like that. The other thing though I would say is women. In the second or the third third of Python women underrepresented groups, maybe Python in Africa, are becoming a thing. And that wasn't accidental. In the second third, PyCon of the PSF had a strategy, had a plan, Jessica McKellar and made shit happen. So you can look in the world of Python to find two examples that answer your question. Good enough? All right, thanks. Other questions. First, Mark Andre, were you at EuroPython1 in Charleau? You were an organizer of EuroPython1? Hell yeah. You do not learn your lesson, do you? Jesus Christ. All right. Another question. Another funny story. Anybody got anything? Yes. I am not... Okay, I stopped learning Python at 1.5.2, so I am not allowed to answer that. I'm not saying it's all been downhill from there, but after that, it was all computer science-y and stuff. No, funny story. I forgot to repeat the question. What is my least favorite feature of Python? So Larry asked, he said Python 1.6 is great. Funny story. Soul purpose of the 1.6 release. Larry knows this story. He was teeing one up for me. Python 1.6 and Python 2.0 came out at the exact same time. What was the difference? Come see me in the booth. I'll tell you. Anything else? All right. In conclusion. Thank you for saying so long. In conclusion, I talked about the first third, second third, last third of Python. And in the first third, there was a group of people, especially in the second third of people, third of Python, group of heroes. Now we're in this third third of Python, and hopefully there will be a fourth third, thus breaking my metaphor. In this third third of Python, who's going to be the next bad ass? Python continues to thrive because new people come in. They become volunteers at the Europe Python conference. They become middle management at the Europe Python conference. Then they spread into working for Larry on the core language. Get involved. Have fun. Do the work no one else wants to do. Kick ass. Become a Python bad ass. Thank you.