I wrote this some time ago about Tim:
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I worked with Tim and the rest of Python Labs for a couple of years in the early 2000s. Tim was a hugely positive influence on me throughout my Python career.
Before I had ever spoken to Tim, he was already legendary. He had worked for Cray Research writing compilers for supercomputers, and for Dragon Systems, writing speech-to-text software at a time when such a task was considered largely impossible. He took up Python on a lark in its very early days, becoming something like Python’s second real user after Guido.
Guido came to rely on Tim heavily. Tim will demur about this, but as far as I can tell, Tim and Guido were largely partners in the design evolution of very early Python, and before most important features made it in to Python, you could be sure that they had been examined from every angle, shaken, stirred, and thunk about very hard by both of them.
Tim often played the role of gatekeeper and polisher. You have Tim to thank at least partially if you were a refugee from Java or Microsoft languages, which made excuses for their sprawling verbosity, complexity, and poor readability. Python, at the time, made none of those and had none of that (it now does). Tim was crucial in ensuring it stayed that way during his most active years. He will claim differently, but, by my observation, it is no accident that Python ballooned in complexity after his exit as day-to-day core developer. Perhaps this was more due to the resignation of Guido as BDFL and the new Steering Council model, which was also coincident, but not having Tim around didn’t help either.
It was pure joy to read Tim’s Usenet and mail list posts, which were full of humor and good nature and measured positivity and not a little winking darkness. They somehow resonated with me on my journey from becoming a new programmer to a not-so-new programmer and they lit a path to becoming one on which you could be dramatically competent without becoming cryptic and insufferable. He was intensely knowledgeable, and unfailingly precise when arguing for or against some design change. But he was always gentle and patient and matter-of-fact, preferring to use humor and warmth rather than bile and authority as the currency in which he dealt.
Tim penned “the Zen of Python” (“beautiful is better than ugly…”) which can be seen via “import this” to this day. You can see a bit of his wonderful humor and style in the prelude to his introduction of the poem . His enthusiasm was infectious, and in the days when he was most involved, most everyone could be witnessed spouting Tim-isms (winks and “'lys” and whatnot).
When I did get the chance to work with Tim, he was just as influential. He had absolutely no pretensions. If I hadn’t already known him to be a computer savant, I would have assumed he was a biker or mechanic due to his long grey locks, full mustache and and working-class fashion sense. I would later find out that he had indeed worked at Harley-Davidson. I think he’s originally from Wisconsin, but an East- or West-Coaster not fluent in Midwest tongues could be excused for believing his disarming accent is Chicagoan. He seemed just like a regular-looking neighborhood punch-the-clock guy, not unlike all the mechanics and deliverymen and cooks and dishwashers and event staff I’d worked around as a kid and in my 20s. Except he was pretty much the smartest guy in every room he entered.
Tim’s demeanor and lack of pretense inspired me to think that despite my own lack of education and pedigree, with enough effort and grace, that I might become a half-competent programmer. And eventualy I did. But before meeting Tim, it was not a given. I was alienated by the pretensions of my community peers, and I was often reminded that they were not necessary only by Tim.
He was somewhat private. He could often be found with a pen and paper outside the building just standing alone, staring blankly off into space, presumably thinking about some mind-boggling algorithmic topic with which he had just been charged by our CTO, or perhaps mentally designing some aspect of a pet project, scribbling something every few minutes. He applied himself to our code, which included a custom database written in C and Python. He diagnosed and fixed a data-destroying bug in that byzantine codebase for our largest customer. This saved the account, and likely gave us enough runway for another year or so.
Everyone who worked there was in awe of his programming and debugging skills, and while we tried our best to let the poor man be, we often asked him questions, many of which were pedestrian and dull. I remember one of our teammates trying to engage him into a debugging session, claiming that some fault seemed to happen every six runs. He smiled winkingly and asked “have you grepped the source for six?” It was a minor jab but given the sincerity of the question, and the person from which it had come, it occurred to me at the time that it might not be the worst theory of debugging from which to start.
Tim was a Director of the Python Software Foundation from 2001 to 2014, bringing Python across an uncanny valley from a time where it was “interesting but ignorable” to “the planet’s default language” along with a cast of other incredible people. If you use Python, it’s not in small part due to Tim.
When I started my own open source projects, it was Tim whom I channeled during design discussions and sprints. I quite consciously used tricks I had learned from him to make the process fun and welcoming. Rather than become prickly about some technical conflict, I would try to use low-brow humor to defuse things and I would try very hard to learn everything I could about the topic before responding such that I could gain and rely on the respect of other contributors. I often failed, of course, because I’m not Tim, but I was at least a twentieth a Tim, and at the time, I think my co-contributors would have agreed that the projects I led were fun and worthwhile to work on.
It is in this way that Tim’s influence is likely most obvious to people today, because I’m not the only one who channeled him; any Python project started between 1995 and 2010 has a bit of Tim culture in it.
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In sadness,
. C
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