The discussion centers on the death of Python contributor Tim Peters, with widespread tributes to his technical legacy like Timsort and the Zen of Python clashing with heated disagreements over his controversial suspension by the Python Software Foundation. While many users urge focusing solely on his contributions, others argue that ignoring the PSF's handling of his ban is a disservice to his memory and an endorsement of flawed community governance.
189 readable replies · Supporting reply 1 · Supporting reply 2 · Supporting reply 3 · Supporting reply 4python
cpython
Python2014–2026
python / cpython
cpython
The Python programming language
400Distinct people
547Mentions
3Explicit recommenders
78.2KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
The Python programming language
GitHub
Where it is used
- AWS Lambda — AWS Lambda provides a managed runtime and container base image for Python 3.11 that runs on CPython’s interpreter improvements. It uses CPython’s specialization adaptive interpreter features to improve Lambda workloads’ performance. Source
- abridging clinical conversations using python — “In addition to the above-mentioned instances, we also use Python widely in conjunction with several Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services and to set up other monitoring and debugging tools.” Source
- 4 more documented examples
What people are saying
I love the description in the draft PR: 'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the code Not a core dev was merging, not even Guido; The CI was spun on the PRs with…
divbzero used a recommendation phrase. 3 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
Favorable Commenters discuss Tim Peters' contributions to CPython, including int-to-str conversion and Timsort. The tone is respectful and appreciative of his technical achievements.
This week’s discussion is favorable. This is not a standing endorsement. Read the supporting reply
Also in these discussions
- golang/go · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- nodejs/node · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- ruby/ruby · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Favorable
Commenters discuss Tim Peters' contributions to CPython, including int-to-str conversion and Timsort. The tone is respectful and appreciative of his technical achievements.
Supporting reply 1 · Supporting reply 2 · 2 discussions summarized
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
Read the discussion on HN. A full-thread summary is not available yet.
Read the discussion on HN. A full-thread summary is not available yet.
Showing the three threads with the most distinct people linking this repo, from 5 threads this week.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year547 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2014-12-30 12:04:55 UTC to 2026-10-27 17:34:51 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 20 | 2 | 18 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 36 | 4 | 32 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 28 | 2 | 26 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 33 | 4 | 29 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 54 | 2 | 52 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 62 | 3 | 59 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 63 | 6 | 57 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 64 | 4 | 60 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 70 | 6 | 64 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 72 | 6 | 66 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 40 | 5 | 35 |
What Hacker News says
20 sourcesJAjamesdutc·Dec 21, 2016
Brett, thanks for contributions to Python.
(... and thanks to the other contributors, https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Misc/ACKS, and to all people who volunteer their by contributing to open source...)
I am another silent user, someone who lurks on every Python thread on HackerNews but finds the discussion often too contentious to bear.
I know you personally, and I'm sure I've said this to you in person, but maybe you'll accept my sincerity if I say it in public:
You bring a certain sensitivity, a level-headedness and moderating influence to the Python community. Discussion within technical communities is rough, even when everyone is aligned toward the same goal. Any lurker on #python-dev can see how quickly discussion can break down.
These communities need people like you, even though they sometimes seemed designed to grind
Read the rest
down people like you.
Double big props, and hang in there!
I doubt that because defining a namedtuple just creates a new class internally: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Lib/collection...
Class creation the very expensive in Python, so Guido van Rossum explicitly recommends against using dynamically created namedtuples: https://mail.python.org/pipermail//python-ideas/2016-April/0...
In What’s New In Python 3.6It's worth pointing out that nobody actually uses the RFC 4180 version of CSV. And so ...
> A CSV parser is trivial to implement
A parser for any one dialect of CSV is trivial to implement. A parser which can robustly parse many different dialects of CSV is quite a challenge. Have a read of Python's:
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Lib/csv.py
EDIT: It's probably not fair to say that nobody actually uses the RFC 4180 version of CSV. Some programs use it explicitly, and many more conform to it by chance because it codified the most common practices around CSV. For example, it appears that Excel conforms to RFC 4180:
http://superuser.com/questions/302334/true-difference-betwee...
In RFC4180 – Common Format and MIME Type for CSV Files (2005)CPython's documentation about lnotab_notes, the line number table
2 points · Open discussionWhat about the code for this python regular expression engine that is filled with goto statements?
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Modules/sre_li...
Or the code for the OpenSSL handshake that interleaves preprocessing directives?
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/master/test/handshak...
In What to Do When Your Colleague Creates Spaghetti CodeThe java source is using str.split(',') which is completely different than Python's offering of dialect/delimiter/etc https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Lib/csv.py#L24
In Golang – encoding/csv: Reading is slowThis article points out a few right things, but also skips over the wrong parts.
Namely, the amortised time complexity of dynamic lists.
Amortised analysis treats operations not as single events but looks at the time complexity over the span of many operations (through something called "Accounting"). An initial "investment" of array over-allocation will be amortised by inserting, but only over time. Inserting into an ArrayList will be in O(1) given enough insert operations.
Essentially, you over-allocate in order to save time. You're trading time complexity for space complexity.
A really good explanation on amortised analysis can be found here on Wikipedia, which explicitly treats ArrayList:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amortized_analysis#Dynamic_Arr...
As always, a look into the source code of your language of choice helps. In Python, a
Read the rest
list object over-allocates using a very peculiar, but finely tuned formula: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/09dc3ec1713c677f71ba7...
Most programming languages do not use secure random number generators. As you suggested it is not always wise to use UUIDs for API keys if you are not sure about the nature of the PRNG.
Python for example uses os.urandom for random UUID generation (uuid4), as can be seen in the source: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.5/Lib/uuid.py#L603
The standard library guarantees that os.urandom is "[...] suitable for cryptographic use." (https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/os.html#os.urandom)
I'm not sure about other languages, so it might always be a good idea to look it up in the source code.
In How Long Should I Make My API Key?It's not part of the Python grammar as specified in the file called Grammar in the canonical implementation of the language (https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Grammar/Gramma...). Of course it's part of the grammar in the larger sense. I don't think that that distinction is important when trying to convince someone with no theoretical background to learn these topics, which is what the video in question is trying to do.
In Destroy All Software relaunchesYes, I'm quite sure, since your code above contains "return SENTINAL" and you fixed the bug in your link. (It's also sentinel.) It's doubly incorrect even in a specification sense, since dict.get defaults to None by returning NULL (it is implemented in C in CPython[0][1], and I'm assuming you can read those references based on your assertion of skill) and no sentinel is used or needed. In your Python translation, that'd be defaulting to None instead of a sentinel. It's triply incorrect because dict.get also does not re-raise a KeyError; it always returns something barring a runtime error of some kind or asking for a key that cannot be hashed:
>>> {}.get({}) is None
TypeError: unhashable type: 'dict'
>>> {}.get("key") is None
True
>>> {}.__hash__ is None
True
>>> "key".__hash__ is None
False
Let me fix y
Read the rest
our example for you:
def get(self, key, default=None):
try:
return self[key]
except KeyError:
return default
Although really, the C implementation does this, indirectly:
def get(self, key, default=None):
return self[key] if key in self else default
The reason I say indirectly is because (a) there's no exception handling in use in the C case and (b) there's no equivalent to the hash table lookup failing when written in Python, so it's an inexpressible concept. That Python will search twice, while the C does not. The KeyError except is a nice analog, but CPython does not futz with stack frames at all if the key lookup fails, so it's not directly comparable to your version. My final version is the closest you'll get to translating what Python does to Python.
If you're speaking with someone new, you can learn a lot more by not condescendingly assuming competence of the other party, particularly when they correctly spotted those three problems and you didn't. I trust this reply will alleviate the misconception.
[0]: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Objects/dictob...
[1]: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Objects/dictob...
It really is the hard way. For the curious, read through the comment here describing the data layout and invariants:
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Include/unicod...
In UTF-8 Everywhere (2012)If you are lexing there is a much better way than trying to munge together a giant regex manually:
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.4/Lib/re.py#L346
In Python 3.4 supports only 100 regex groupsI guess you meant Python 3.4 because 3.5 has no limitation: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.5/Lib/sre_compile.p...
In Python 3.4 supports only 100 regex groupsPython 3.4 supports only 100 regex groups
26 points · Open discussionShowing the 15 most recent of 20 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.