From 7053db9cdf7ab3b1017d3f584755c380aba2bf44 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Casper da Costa-Luis Date: Fri, 10 May 2019 23:16:23 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] add a brief history --- History.md | 61 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 61 insertions(+) create mode 100644 History.md diff --git a/History.md b/History.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d703092 --- /dev/null +++ b/History.md @@ -0,0 +1,61 @@ +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](https://xkcd.com/353/)~~ 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](https://github.com/tqdm/tqdm/milestone/8) 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 + +[![`@casperdcl`](https://img.shields.io/badge/GitHub-%40casperdcl-black.svg?style=social&logo=github)](https://github.com/casperdcl) +[![](https://img.shields.io/badge/dynamic/json.svg?color=ff69b4&label=gifts%20received&prefix=%C2%A3&query=%24..sum&url=https%3A%2F%2Fcaspersci.uk.to%2Fgifts.json)](https://caspersci.uk.to/donate) + +---- + +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](https://www.mozilla.org/MPL/2.0) licence because it's actually a +licence. It took [a lot of work to find +it](https://github.com/tqdm/tqdm/pull/124). Seriously, [discussion were +had](https://github.com/tqdm/tqdm/issues/121). Some of them not even public. We +don't use its "exhibit B" because we're not silly.