Indeed, as someone with some grey in his beard, it hits harder because these where names I was familiar with when I was young (and now I'm not), I've never really been in the python world but I've used it a fair bit over the years and so I've seen comments from Tim here and there, it seeps into your conscious over time.

There are a handful of names in the tech industry who will hit me particularly hard and among those one who will really make me pause.

They will leave behind work that continues to impact the world but given the choice I'd still have them in it.

In my case none of the work I leave behind is going to mean a real lot outside of the people who paid me for that and I'm old enough that the majority of what I've written over the years is now no longer having any impact (refactored or replaced after years) though I'm aware of one that is still actively supported now that is 17 years old.

Almost everything all of us do in terms of actual work output is transient but we do leave memories, I have a mental list of programmers I've worked with over the years who left a last impact and while none of them afaik had the impact of Tim Peters broadly they did narrowly for me at least.

> slowly being piped to /dev/random.

Some are gently deallocated. Others are garbage-collected.

(We've since merged that thread hither.)

There's also a brief statement on LWN (https://lwn.net/Articles/1106901/), although it only really links to the announcement. Still good to know that they care.

Sounds like he was living quietly out of the spotlight, or his family kept news of his death private. He died back in July.

Agreed. As it was for Fredrik Lundh (aka "the effbot") a few years ago.

banned for insignificant banality by peoples with misplaced hyper sensitivity. It's a black mark on the code of conduct not on Tim Peter !

I'm willing to bet money that the most rabid (scratch that) vocal people who demanded blood, didn't contribute to Python language and Python community 0.0001% of what he did. Just a hunch.

What actually happened (feel free to look it up), is that Tim got into a series of disagreements with people who wrote things like:

''' Our current board has a majority of people from the Global South or otherwise marginalized groups. That is encouraging and an extremely positive thing. As long as people who are demographically similar to me do not again have a majority, I have the utmost faith in the Board.

As far as I’ve seen, the entire support of this amendment comes from people who look and speak a whole lot like me. People like me should not be trusted. '''

I think that such people have embarrassed themselves sufficiently over the past few years, and that Tim would not have wanted us to use his obituary to embarrass them further. I say this as a person whose family comes from the Northern hemisphere portion of the Global South.

From "The Shameful Defenestration of Tim" [0]:

> "Instead, Python is now a grey, humorless, corporate place. The Steering Council and CoC Working Groups assume they can simply get away with asserting their correctness, crushing any dissent gracelessly, and relying on Python now being too big to fail. They’re probably right. That is a shame. Being now too big to fail is in no small part due to Tim being exactly whom he is within the threads that they derive their accusations from, and he deserves better."

Somehow I missed all the (disgusting) drama back then, but Tim had an entire page dedicated to PSF's woke insanity [1]. Rest in peace.

[0] https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/the-shameful-defenestr...

[1] https://tim-one.github.io/psf/

lol, that's a badge of fucking honor right there!