Like so many others here, my life will be enormously diminished by Tim’s absence. Even though my relationship with Timmy was only over wires, it was over the course of 25+ years, and both in groups, and frequently one-to-one. His intelligence—and his compassion—was so important at so many points in my life.
I know that I’m violating my ongoing ban that arose from the stupid kerfuffle that also led to Tim’s temporary ban from Discourse. But I want to share my love and respect for Tim with fellow Pythonistas before I go away again.
Since I first started reading comp.lang.python in 2000, Tim was a defining voice of Python, and a huge part of what attracted me to Python. Brett famously commented many years ago that he came for the language, but stayed for the community … for me it was the reverse, I came for the community, and stayed for the language. That community was in very large measure defined by Uncle Timmy’s kindness and wit.
I think Tim is quoted in all of the Python books I’ve written. It’s hard to avoid quoting the Zen of Python, after all. But it’s not limited to that. In 2003, I included this exchange as something deeply illustrative of the joy of Python’s community at its best:
Python luminary and erstwhile professor of numeric computing Alex Martelli
commented in 2001 (on ‘<comp.lang.python>’):
Anybody who thinks he knows what he's doing when floating
point is involved IS either naive, or Tim Peters (well, it
COULD be W. Kahan I guess, but I don't think he writes here).
Fellow Python guru Tim Peters observed:
I find it's possible to be both (wink). But *nothing* about
fp comes easily to anyone, and even Kahan works his butt off
to come up with the amazing things that he does.
I had the honor of serving on the PSF board with Tim, and he was always the best of us, understanding community as much as he did programming and mathematical concepts.
Over the years, I’ve had such interesting and deep conversations with Tim. We were both a bit wonkish about voting theory, which led to the Approval Voting system PSF uses, but also went in many interesting directions in discussing IRV versus other tabulation systems. IRV, misleadingly called “ranked choice voting” here in Maine where I now live, is “the worst system other than plurality” as Tim described it; a comment I frequently crib.
When I became curious about Unum/Posit arithmetic in comparison with IEEE-754 FP, Tim was the first and most fruitful interlocutor I sought out.
My ridicuously compact “library” for run-length encoding is basically a conversation with Tim:
def rle_encode(it):
return ((k, len(list(g))) for k, g in groupby(it))
def rle_decode(it):
return chain.from_iterable(repeat(x, n) for x, n in it)
This is a silly footnote, but so many of the footnotes in my life have often needed a citation to Timmy.
It wasn’t only the technical topics though. Mostly from FB posts and conversations, but then also spilling into private emails, I enjoyed so much his contributions to political discussions of democracy, civil liberties, privacy, governance and imperialism. I was often maddened by his centrism, and he was perhaps troubled by my ultra-leftism, but whatever the details of those talks his kindness always shone through.
I had somewhat noticed an absence over the last few months of Tim’s comments on my largely political posts to FB; but the absence was a murmur not a din. Since I learned last night of his death, I feel like every comment thread where he is missing will come with a sigh and a tear.
–David