The scene: it's 2015. It's planet Earth. A human is writing code.
A for loop to be precise.
It happens to be in a programming language called Python. This provokes an age-old question to arrive unabashedly in the human's mind:
When will it end?
But the human knows that said language is full of
antigravity syntactic sugar.
The human also knows that there exists other humans who also use Python.
Surely someone else had uploaded a solution to Earth's ubiquitous web of
connected computing devices?
The search began.
And ended reasonably quickly on GitHub with a short-list of about 10 equally mediocre competitors. One pull request led to another; digital heads were turned; abandoned projects were resuscitated, and to cut a long story short, the library you know and love today was labouriously born.
te quiero demasiado... تقدّم... in short, tqdm.
It's still sort of being born; if I ever get around to releasing v5 I will officially call it "out of beta phase."
I don't get paid for this.
I didn't expect it to be used by anyone. Millions of downloads a month and ten thousand stars are just numbers to me. I only started to realise how out of hand things were when someone I've never met spent a lot of time composing a song about this work, and wrote it in obscure comment in an obscure blog without telling me or anyone else about it. You can find it if you look.
On the plus side, tqdm's been a great way for me to keep abreast of the latest
paradigms and technologies. Jupyter. Docker. Snapcraft. Markdown. GitHub. PyPI.
Conda. Travis. Binder. Coveralls. Codecov. Codacy. SourceRank. SemVer. Zenodo.
OpenHub. ASV. MPLv2.0... the list goes on and I haven't even mentioned web
design and services, let alone Python itself or the nightmare that is
cross-platform compatibility.
Casper da Costa-Luis, 2019
P.S. Licence: yes, we use British spelling. The MIT licence is a verbose piece
of despicable marketing that the world inexplicably seems to like "because of
its brevity," oblivious to the fact that "copyleft" is a far superior
single-word replacement. We mention it anyway since we like keeping people happy
regardless of how wrong we think they are (the same philosophy is responsible
for a lot of features added to tqdm). We do however prefer the
MPLv2.0 licence because it's actually a
licence. It took a lot of work to find
it. Seriously, discussion were
had. Some of them not even public. We
don't use its "exhibit B" because we're not silly.
(Since 19 May 2016)