A must-watch full-length documentary for all Pythonistas is to be premiered on August 28th. This 3-minute trailer gives a taster of what to expect.

The documentary comes from Cult.Repo, an independently-owned and community- and sponsor-funded YouTube channel that is on a mission to document the complete history of every major open source language ever created. Formerly Honeypot, Cult.Repo is the team behind documentaries on VueJS, Kubernetes and GraphQL and also the clips we included in Advice and Admissions From Creator of C++ in which Bjarne Stroustrup tells in an interview how he became a computer scientist by mistake.

According to its blurb on YouTube:

From a side project in Amsterdam to powering AI at the world’s biggest companies - this is the story of Python. Featuring Guido van Rossum, Travis Oliphant, Barry Warsaw, and many more, our upcoming full-length documentary traces Python’s slow-but-steady rise, its community-driven evolution, and the language’s impact on... well… everything.

Going by the content of the trailer, in the Python documentary you can expect to hear from many big names in the Python community, with Guido van Rossum being the most prominent. It certainly has a feel good factor while the same time admitting the lows - the Python 2 to 3 crisis and the fact that having been made Python's "Benevolent Dictator for Life" Guido abruptly resigned in 2018, admitting to camera that he "rage quit" - if you want to know more about this in advance of the documentary see Guido van Rossum On Python and Diversity in Open Source and the news items it references, in particular Guido van Rossum Quits As Python BDFL.

Although Guido parted company with the open source community he hasn't given up on Python and now works on it from within Microsoft with the predominant concern of making CPython faster.

Meanwhile Python, which in September will see the release of version 3.14, has gone from strength to strength being the ideal language for data science, machine learning and AI. As a general-purpose language it is also used in every sphere and domain and on I Programmer we continue to chart its rise on the TIOBE index where this month it reached the milestone of having the highest rating of any language in the 24-year history of the index by attaining a percentage rating of 26.98%, surpassing Java's 26.49% share in the very first edition, the first time any language has done this. 

So what are Python's secret powers - there are the obvious ones and the not-so-obvious. The obvious ones are that it is a very easy language to get started with, but this doesn't limit what you can do. You can write Python as if it was a simple scripting language and later on go on to discover that it is a full object-oriented language with lots of sophistication. A second, only slighly less obvious, attraction is that it has all of the extras so that you can write targeted programs in only a few lines of code. Want a web server - one line of code. This is what they mean when they say "batteries included".

Far far less obvious is the implemenation of the CPython system. This is as much responsible for the way Python has developed as any other design decision. Being written in C isn't enough to make something easy to extend using C. CPython, on the other hand has a design, that makes it very easy to connect C code to Python language structures. The underlying structure of CPython makes it easy to support advanced data types such as dictionaries in a relatively efficient way. Of course, if it isn't C is can't be as fast as C and Python's one weakness is that it isn't as fast as we would like - but it is a small price to pay for the rest.

• Mike James is the author of the Programmer's Python: Something Completely Different series of books, see sidebar, which set out to show how Python diverges from other programming languages and how its special features deserve attention. His more recent title Extending and Embedding Python Using C  solves many of Python's speed-related problems. 

More Information

Cult Repo

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