Understanding the History of the Poem

00:00 To understand how the poem came about, you must take a trip back in time to June 1999, to the Python mailing list, where lots of developers were asking for advice on how best to use the language, saying, “There doesn’t seem to be a single document that sums up that aesthetic,” and “A distillation of Python Zen is what I’m talking about.” Tim Peters suggested it was “a job for Guido alone” (Guido van Rossum was the creator of Python), but offered an outline he would start from, and that outline was the Zen of Python.

00:36 In 2004, an official Python Enhancement Proposal was created to formalize these guidelines. It was given the PEP number 20, in reference to the number of aphorisms it was supposed to contain.

00:48 In reality, it only contains 19, as one was left for Guido van Rossum, which was never filled in.

00:56 Almost twenty years later, in April 2023, a vinyl record called “The Zen Side of the Moon” was auctioned at PyCon US. Its closing track was a musical version of the Zen of Python, which core Python developer Barry Warsaw composed and performed, proving that, to this day, this poetic and humorous collection of guidelines has a significant impact on the Python community.

01:19 If you’d like to listen to the song, you can find a link for it below the video. Now that you know where the poem originated, and how valuable it is, you probably want to know how it can help you improve your Python.

01:31 In the next lesson, we will start with some practical advice it contains that you can start applying immediately.