The History of Python

David Beazley's talk at US PyCon 2018, about parser generators, reminded me I should write a bit about its history. Here'.s a brief brain dump (maybe I'll expand later)
There are actually two pgens. The original, in C, and a rewrite in Python, under lib2to3/pgen2....

Writing up the reasons why True and False, when introduced, weren't reserved words, I realized there's another interesting lesson in the history of Python's bool type. It was formally introduced in Python 2.3, as a new type with two constants, and the...

I received an interesting question in the mail recently:
What is the difference between keywords and literals? Why are True and False keywords rather than literals in python3?
I was horrified recently to find that assigning to True/False works in python2. So I went digging, and found that True and False were created to be 'constants' like None in PEP 285. Assignment to None was disallowed in 2.4, but not to True/False until...

There was some speculation on python-ideas today on whether Python's metaclass design came from Ruby. It did not. And as long as we are speculating about the origins of language features, I feel the need to set the record straight.
I was not inspired by Ruby at that point (or ever :-). Ruby was in fact inspired by Python. Mats once told me that his inspiration was 20% Python, 80% Perl, and that Larry Wall is his hero....