The Past, Present, And Future Of The FLUFL: Barry Warsaw Shares His History With Python

Summary

Barry Warsaw has been a member of the Python community since the very beginning. His contributions to the growth of the language and its ecosystem are innumerable and diverse, earning him the title of Friendly Language Uncle For Life. In this episode he reminisces on his experiences as a core developer, a member of the Python Steering Committee, and his roles at Canonical and LinkedIn supporting the use of Python at those companies. In order to know where you are going it is always important to understand where you have been and this was a great conversation to get a sense of the history of how Python has gotten to where it is today.

Announcements

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Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Barry Warsaw about his role in the Python community, past, present, and future.

Interview

Introductions

How did you get introduced to Python?

For anyone who isn’t familiar with you, how would you characterize your role in the Python language and community?

What have been your main areas of focus in your role as a core developer?

What are some of the other forms that your contributions to the language and community have taken?

What are the contributions to Python that you are most proud of?

Looking back at the past 25 years of Python, what do you find most interesting/surprising/exciting?

How has the focus of the community changed or evolved since you first began using it?

What are you currently focused on in your role in the steering council?

What are the aspects of the language and community that you think need greater attention?

What are the core strengths of the language and community that you believe will carry it through the next 25 years?

In your current and previous roles you acted as a guiding force for Python. What are the main use cases for Python at LinkedIn?

What kinds of projects are you involved with to support the other engineers in their use of Python?

How much of an impact has the invisible hand of the PSU had on the overall trajectory of Python?

Outside of Python, what are the programming languages or communities that you look to for inspiration?

What are your personal goals for the future of Python?

Keep In Touch

Website

warsaw on GitHub

warsaw on GitLab

Blog

@pumpichank on Twitter

Picks

Tobias

Hanna TV Series

Barry

Midnight Gospel

The Expanse

TV Series

Audio Books

Free 30 Day Audible Trial (Affiliate Link)

Closing Announcements

Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, the Data Engineering Podcast for the latest on modern data management.

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Links

FLUFL PEP 401

Python Steering Council

The PEP Talk episode

Usenet

BBS == Bulletin Board System

comp.lang.python

NIST == National Institute of Standards and Technology

CNRI == Corporation for National Research Initiatives

BayPIGgies

Tcl/Tk

PEP 572 := The Walrus Operator

"The Grand Renaming"

IETF == Internet Engineering Task Force

RFC

WebAssembly

Python Software Foundation

Podcast Episode

Python Black Swans keynote by Russell Keith-Magee

Followup Podcast Episode

Ewa Jodlowska

Canonical Launchpad

Mypy

Podcast Episode

Python Type Annotations

Iris Event Paging System

OnCall Pager Rotation System

Shiv

PyOxidizer

Rust

Flake8

isort

Black

Sphinx

Read The Docs

Podcast Episode

Sybil

Manuel

Doctest

Pytest

Coverage.py

Cargo package system

Tai Chi

Python Core Mentorship

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA