A few additions from the very early days.
- Paul Dubois, researcher (manager?) at LLNL, who picked Python to replaces a home-grown scripting language to drive large numeric C++/Fortran libraries. Paul hosted the 4th Python workshop at LLNL.
- Don Beaudry. Attended the first workship in 1994. A prolific coder of a very early proprietary library. He invented something that for a long time was called the “Don Beaudry Hack” and then promoted to “Don Beaudry Hook”, whereby a class statement could be abused if the first base class override a certain interface. This led to the unification of types and classes in Python 2.2, and his invention is now known as metaclasses.
- Lance Ellinghaus. Very active on the mailing list during the ‘90s, and author of the original ‘curses’ bindings.
- Amrit Prem, the author of lambda, filter, map and reduce. He sent me a complete, working patch that I just applied and made part of version 1.0 of the language (1994). I recall him also being active on the list, though not for how long.
- Aaron Watters. Also an active question-answerer on the list and a heavy Python promoter (notably for cientific and network programming), and co-author of one of the the first two Python book ever published (“Internet Programming with Python”, MIS:Press 1996).
- Jim Ahlstrom, co-author of the same book. (While I was listed as an author, I didn’t contribute anything.
) He was quite active in the mid ‘90s and local to the PythonLabs folks; I believe he was involved in the original creation of the Python Software Activity (mentioned in the film). - Mark Lutz, author of the O’Reilly hit “Programming Python” (O’Reilly 1996), the other book.
Hopefully others can provide some more color for the following:
- Raymond Hettinger.
- Greg Stein.
- Moshe Zadka.
- Konrad Hinsen (briefly mentioned in the film).
Let’s also not forget Michael Foord – not super early but developed the various Mock libraries and ran the early Language Summits (with Barry).
Tim, I need your help recalling the name of another early active guy. IIRC he had a Scandinavian name, was a chain smoker, often contrarian, and at some point he died. Would be nice to honor him here.
A few notes on Neil’s and Tim’s notes:
- Ping was author of several key PEPs, including an early one about the iterator protocol and the one proposing nonlocal, as well as one about exception chaining. All features we just take for granted. He appears in the film on the PythonLabs photo, all the way on the right.
- IIRC Mark Hammond [corrected] did not create WinPython (I believe we did at CWI, where I had experience building for Windows from my work on ABC?) but he definitely wrote the libraries that made it useful, providing bindings to all the win32 APIs.