Guido van Rossum

So I like that there is a lively package ecosystem and that sort of recent trends in the standard library are actually that we're doing the occasional spring cleaning where we're just... We're choosing some modules that have not had a lot of change in a long time and that maybe...

would be better off not existing at all at this point because there might be a better third party alternative anyway.

And we're sort of slowly removing those.

Often those are things that I sort of, I spiked somewhere in 1992 or 1993.

If you look through the commit history, it's very sad, like,

all cosmetic changes like changes in the indentation style or the name of this other standard library module got changed or nothing, nothing of any substance.

The API is identical to what it was 20 years ago.

Well, part of it is an effect that's as simple as we're all driving on the right side of the road, right?

It's compatibility.

And part of it is not quite as fundamental as driving on the right side of the road, which you have to do for safety reasons.

I mean, you have to agree on something.

They could have picked JavaScript or Perl.

There was a time in the early 2000s that it really looked like Perl was going to dominate like biosciences because DNA search was all based on regular expressions and Perl has the fastest and most comprehensive regular expression engine, still does.

The reasons why Python became the lingua franca of scientific code and machine learning in particular, and data science, it really had a lot to do with anything was better than C or C++.

Recently, a guy who worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in the computing division wrote me his memoirs, and he had his own view of how he helped something he called computational steering into existence.

Mm-hmm.

And this was the idea that you take libraries that in his days were written in Fortran that solved universal mathematical problems.

And those libraries still work.

But the scientists that used the libraries used them to solve continuously different problems.

specific applications and answer different questions.