I have the Zen of python printed out on our office wall and everyone quotes it at least weekly. It started as a bit of a joke, but become a pretty big part of our culture. It's a great set of rules.

The world is a bit dimmer for your absence. We miss you.

Ugh. As a teen in the aughts interested in computers two things stuck with me. Sitting in his lap and "helping" my dad do SQL modules as he job hunted after the dot com crash, and "discovering" the Zen of Python and Python many years later.

Never really ended up using Python outside one-off scripts and personal stuff but learning the magick of making silicon do work for you and principles for that really stuck with me as I went to high school and beyond.

RIP :'(

He once answered my noob stackoverflow question. I had a fanboy moment after reading the about section of his profile: https://stackoverflow.com/users/2705542/tim-peters

He'll be sorely missed by everyone who has read the Zen of Python (but not limited to it ofc).

Every time `1 + 2.5` just works in Python, that's Tim. RIP

Genuine question - why do you think many seminal figures in CS dying at a relatively young age?

I quoted im earlier today in a commit message at work. Not knowing him at all, this news is a bit of a shock.

RIP. I didn't know him IRL, but I remember him fondly from the Python Usenet group and Python bug tracker discussions.

The Steering Council bureaucrats must be very happy that he cannot "post too many mails" or "use the wrong language" on the mailing lists any longer.

Your corporate sinecure "custom Python distributions" are secure now!

I miss arguing with Perl… back in the day I wrote a full http proxy in Perl that rewrote and compressed http requests. Fun times.