Barry Warsaw was one of the 20 or so developers present at that first-ever workshop for the newly-created Python programming language and recalls the palpable excitement among those early users.

“I can remember one person in particular who said, ‘You cannot tell anybody that I’m here because our use of Python is a competitive advantage.’ It was their secret weapon, right?”

Even at that early meeting, at the then US National Standards Bureau in Maryland, Warsaw says it was evident that Python offered something new in how easy it was to write code and simply get things done.

“When I first was introduced to Python, I knew there was something special. It was some combination of readability, and there was a joy to writing Python code,” he remembers.