The Pythonic Way

How did the Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) process come about?

Guido: That’s a very interesting historical tidbit. I think it was mostly started and championed by Barry Warsaw, one of the core developers. He and I started working together in ‘95, and I think around 2000, he came up with the suggestion that we needed more of a formal process around language changes.

I tend to be slow in these things. I mean I wasn’t the person who discovered that we really needed a mailing list. I wasn’t the person who discovered that the mailing list got unwieldy and we needed a newsgroup. I wasn’t the person to propose that we needed a website. I was also not the person to propose that we needed a process for discussing and inventing language changes, and making sure to avoid the occasional mistake where things had been proposed and quickly accepted without thinking through all of the consequences.

At the time between 1995 and 2000, Barry, myself, and a few other core developers, Fred Drake, Ken Manheimer for a while, were all at CNRI, and one of the things that CNRI did was organize the IETF meetings. CNRI had this little branch that eventually split off that was a conference organizing bureau, and their only customer was the IETF. They later also did the Python conferences for a while, actually. Because of that it was a pretty easy boondoggle to attend IETF meetings even if they weren’t local. I certainly got a taste of the IETF process with its RFCs and its meeting groups and stages, and Barry also got a taste of that. When he proposed to do something similar for Python, that was an easy argument to make. We consciously decided that we wouldn’t make it quite as heavy-handed as the IETF RFCs had become by then, because Internet standards, at least some of them, affect way more industries and people and software than a Python change, but we definitely modeled it after that. Barry is a genius at coming up with good names, so I am pretty sure that PEP was his idea.

We were one of the first open source projects at the time to have something like this, and it’s been relatively widely copied. The Tcl/Tk community basically changed the title and used exactly the same defining document and process, and other projects have done similar things.

Source of Information : Oreilly - Masterminds of Programming

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