From Christmas Boredom to Black Holes - short story of Python

Introduction

It's 2025. An invisible object – a black hole – has been photographed. The Perseverance rover roams across Mars, SpaceX is about to establish colonies there, and Grok4 – to make things even more interesting – insults the Pope. The era of artificial intelligence has begun in full force.

Who or what is behind all of this? And how did it start? It all started with... boredom. The boredom of a Dutch programmer during Christmas holidays.

Christmas Boredom (1989)

In December 1989, during the Christmas break from work at the Dutch Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, Guido van Rossum found himself in a situation familiar to every programmer – he had time, a computer, and no specific task.

Instead of, like a normal person, watching 'Home Alone,' van Rossum decided to create something new. A new programming language. He didn't know that thirty years later, his Christmas project would control Martian rovers, process images of black holes, and become the driving force behind the artificial intelligence revolution.

Monty Python and the First Irony

Why 'Python'? It's not about the snake. Van Rossum was a fan of Monty Python's Flying Circus. The name itself was a declaration: you can create powerful tools without losing your sense of humor.

The multilayered irony of this story goes much deeper. The members of the comedy group themselves admitted that the name 'Monty Python' was the result of a whim, meant to sound silly and pretentious. Even they probably never imagined that their absurd idea would influence space exploration, photographing black holes, and AI. And here we have the first great paradox of Python: a language whose name came from a series of comedic antics became the tool powering the most advanced systems in civilization.

Indentation as Brain Training

Van Rossum's goal was simplicity. He had learned from the experimental language ABC. That's why he made several, seemingly minor, decisions, one of which changed programming forever: he decided to use indentation, not braces, to define code structure.

Most programmers initially hated it, and the frustration with this is still visible in the industry today. However, anyone who writes in Python must visualize hierarchy and structure. In this way, van Rossum unknowingly trained millions of people in systematic, structural thinking – he created cognitive training on a massive scale.

The Zen of Python vs Perl's Chaos

The Zen of Python contains its key philosophy: 'There should be one – and preferably only one – obvious way to do it'. This is in direct contrast to Perl's motto: 'There's more than one way to do it'.

This difference isn't technical – it's civilizational. Perl celebrates anarchic freedom. Python promotes a systematic approach. Which approach better fits humanity's technological future? Python's dominance suggests the answer.

The Benevolent Dictator

What's more important? Brilliant code or the people who create it? Van Rossum knew that a brilliant language isn't enough. He proved to be not just a programmer. He proved to be... an intuitive social psychologist.

He created a legendary governance model, calling himself, tongue in cheek, 'Benevolent Dictator For Life' (BDFL). Sounds like a joke, but behind it lay a deep awareness of open source world problems. Democracy in programming often ends in decision paralysis. Dictatorship leads to stagnation. Python chose a third way: enlightened autocracy through the PEP (Python Enhancement Proposal) process. Anyone could propose a change, but the final word belonged to someone who could see the whole picture.

Google and YouTube - Legitimization

And then came legitimization. Early 2000s. Google adopts the motto: 'Python where we can, C++ where we must.' In 2005, Google hired van Rossum. Python went from 'hobby project' to 'serious corporate technology'.

A year later, in 2006, Google bought YouTube – a platform built almost entirely in Python. It's one of Python's biggest and most visible successes in history. This success wouldn't have been possible without Python's first secret weapon: web frameworks. Tools that defined an era emerged: Django with its 'batteries included' philosophy, minimalist Flask, and high-performance FastAPI. Thanks to them, a single developer could build a product in a few weeks that previously required months of work and huge budgets.

NumPy, AI and the Great Irony

But Python's power isn't just about the web. Its second, even more powerful weapon, was born in the world of science, data, and artificial intelligence, and was forged by the community itself. Scientists who needed C++ power but desired Python's simplicity built their own tools: NumPy, Pandas, PyTorch, and many others.

Here we come to another irony. Python's strength doesn't lie in the language itself. The uncomfortable truth is that the vast majority of work comes down to using Python as 'glue' for these libraries that do the heaviest computations. Python just coordinates everything. It's a friendly interface to incredibly powerful engines.

Python 2 vs 3 - The Crisis

Just after Python conquered the world, in 2008 came a crisis that could have destroyed it all. Python 3.0. Van Rossum broke backward compatibility. The programming community reacted with panic, anger, and resistance. Code written in Python 2 didn't work in Python 3. For a decade, two versions of Python existed, splitting the ecosystem in half.

The scale of the challenge? Meta needed nearly two years for migration. An internal marketing campaign with posters showing a Python 2 tombstone. The tech giant had to convince its own engineers to switch. Even with enormous resources, it was harder than expected. Python might not have survived this split. But somehow it managed to glue the community back together. Paradoxically, this traumatic transition turned out to be a long-term success.

Expansion - Who Uses Python

NASA - Mars exploration. Tesla - autonomous vehicles. Netflix - recommendation algorithms. Instagram - image processing. Spotify - music analysis. Uber - ride matching. The list goes on and on.

The Creator's Abdication

Year 2018. Python's creator, Guido van Rossum, does something unexpected. He abdicates. The catalyst was one, seemingly innocent feature: the so-called 'walrus operator' (:=). For some – an elegant improvement. For others – a betrayal of the philosophy of simplicity.

This debate divided the community so deeply that, tired of fighting, van Rossum handed over power. For the first time in history, the community itself took over, creating a democratically elected council – the Steering Council. This was the moment when Python definitively stopped being a personal project. It outgrew its creator and became technology belonging to everyone.

Mars - Python in Space

February 18, 2021. The Perseverance rover lands on Mars. The world watches images from the surface of an alien planet. Processed and transmitted by systems partially powered by... Python. A language created from Christmas boredom is now helping explore space.

Even at this moment, 200 million kilometers away, a car-sized robot is making decisions about which rock to examine next, perhaps one day finding traces of life there. And SpaceX? The company revolutionizing space travel uses Python for rocket control alongside system languages. From test automation to flight control systems - Python helps safely send astronauts into orbit.

Black Hole - Einstein Was Right

How do you photograph the invisible? The Event Horizon Telescope project took on the challenge. Its digital backbone is the Python ecosystem. Libraries like NumPy and SciPy processed unimaginable amounts of data, creating an image of the M87 black hole 55 million light-years away.

And so, one decision, made during a Christmas break, set off a chain of events that delivered photographic proof of Einstein's theory. A photograph of an object so massive it curves spacetime itself. This is the moment when perspective expands to the limits of imagination.

The Language Wars and Democratization

Meanwhile, in the programming world, a quiet war rages. 'Real programmers' look down on Python as a language for amateurs. But this dismissive attitude is misguided. Python's accessibility isn't a bug – it's a feature.

Python democratized programming. Biologists analyzing DNA. Economists modeling markets. Physicists simulating particles. They all became occasional programmers thanks to Python's accessible syntax. This democratization created a massive expansion of the programmer population – a positive feedback loop that powered the entire ecosystem.

Economics - Why Python Won

Why did Python 'win' despite being slow? 'Python succeeded because computational cost is orders of magnitude less than programming cost. A server upgrade is cheap. Hiring another developer – costs a fortune.'

And today, in the AI era, this logic only grows stronger. When machines instantly generate code, the bottleneck becomes the human time spent verifying and correcting it. Python, as a language of human productivity, makes the entire loop – from idea to working prototype – simply the fastest.

Languages as Worldviews

Every programming language has an embedded worldview. Python's enforced indentation teaches structural thinking. 'One obvious way' promotes a systematic approach. These aren't just technical choices – they're philosophical positions. And it's precisely these fundamental assumptions that determine a language's fate.

This core philosophy determines its appeal to programmers. This in turn attracts talent and capital, which build a powerful ecosystem of tools around it. And this ecosystem ultimately defines what can be built with that language in the future. In the world of technology, as in space, some languages slowly fade and fall into oblivion... Others, like Python, evolve into gravitational centers that attract everything: developer talent, hobbyist passion, capital power, and big company interest.

The Price of Progress - The Dark Side of AI

And so the story of a bored programmer becomes a lesson about how one, seemingly small decision, can have unpredictable, civilizational consequences. And those consequences are our present. Most great technological leaps in history carried with them unforeseen, often dark consequences.

The printing press gave us the Renaissance, but also propaganda and religious wars. Cars gave us freedom, but also pollution and noise. Nuclear energy gave us clean power, but also the atomic bomb. So what is the price of the AI revolution, whose driving force is Python? Is it a 'dead internet,' flooded with AI-slop? Mass job losses whose scale we don't yet understand? We don't know the answers to these questions.

Boredom as the Engine of the Universe

But Python's story gives us a certain clue. It shows that the world is changed not by big corporations or government laboratories, but by people who have time to think and the courage to act. Sometimes it's enough to be bored at the right moment.

Or maybe boredom is the true driving force of the universe? Who knows, perhaps even the Big Bang was the result of cosmic boredom and lack of 'Home Alone' in the multiverse. Although a black hole will someday swallow the rover, Mars, and ourselves, Python's story teaches us that what matters is what we do in the meantime. Preferably something creative, instead of just staring at black screens. Unless Monty Python happens to be playing on them.