PEPs & Co.

PEPs #

Here’s Barry Warsaw on the origin of PEPs, or Python Enhancement Proposals (edited from PyBay 2017):

I like backronyms. For those who don’t know: a backronym is where you come up with the acronym first and then you come up with the thing that the acronym stands for. And I like funny sounding words, like FLUFL was one of those. When we were working for CNRI, they also ran the IETF conferences. The IETF is the Internet Engineering Task Force, and they’re the ones who come up with the RFCs. If you look at RFC 822, it defines what an email message looks like.

We got to a point, because we were at CNRI we were more intimately involved in the IETF and how they do standards and things, we observed at the time that there were so many interesting ideas coming in being proposed for Python that Guido really just didn’t have time to dive into the details of everything.

So I thought: well, we have this RFC process, let’s try to mirror some of that so that we can capture the essence of an idea in a document that would serve as a point of discussion, and that Guido could let people discuss and then come in and read the summary of the discussion.

And I was just kind of thinking: well, PEPs, that’s kind of peppy, it’s kind of a funny sounding word. I came up with the word and then I backronymed it into Python Enhancement Proposal. And then I wrote PEP 0 and PEP 1. PEP 0 was originally handwritten, and so I was the first PEP author because I came up with the name PEP.

But the really interesting thing is that you see the E.P. part used in a lot of other places, like Debian has DEPs now. There’s a lot of other communities that have these enhancement proposals so it’s kind of interesting. And then the format of the PEP was directly from that idea of the RFC’s standard.

& Co. #

Here’s a collection of enhancement proposals from different communities.

Are there more? Let me know!

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