'Python: The Documentary' is now out and we have it for you all to view right here. The official premiere took place yesterday evening at PyCon Greece 2025 simultaneously with its availability on You Tube. Twenty-four hours later it has already had almost 60K views and has been warmly welcomed by the Python community around the world.

As we reported in our earlier report on the 3-minute trailer for the documentary it comes from Cult.Repo, formerly Honeypot, that is on a mission to document the complete history of every major open source language ever created.  

In this case director Ida Bechtle has tackled:

the story of the world's most beloved programming language: Python. What began as a side project in Amsterdam during the 1990s became the software powering artificial intelligence, data science and some of the world’s biggest companies. But Python's future wasn't certain; at one point it almost disappeared.

Her 90-minute film features Guido van Rossum, Travis Oliphant, Barry Warsaw, and many more who tell the story of Python’s rise, its community-driven evolution, the conflicts that almost tore it apart, and the impact of the language.

Helpfully it has been split into thirty Chapters, each a few minutes in length. 

A lot of people appear in the documentary and Guido has helpfully provided a list of names to correspond to the faces in the documentary's splash screen:

Back row: Benjamin Peterson, Robin Friedrich, Travis Oliphant, Tim O'Reilly
Middle row: Steven Pemberton, Drew Houston, Jessica McKellar, Armin Ronacher, Brett Cannon, Lisa Roach, Paul Everitt, Mariatta Front row: Barry Warsaw, Sjoerd Mullender, Ken Manheimer, Lisa Guo, Bob Kahn, Lambert Meertens, Peter Wang

The graphic is of course a tribute to Monty Python, the British TV comedy show that inspired the the program's name, a fact that is fleetingly mentioned in the documentary. 

One name that is missing from the cast list is that of Tim Peters who, while he had provided source material to the project and appears in a clip from a PyCon event, didn't actively take part. He is known in the Python Community for the "Zen of Python" which were set out in PEP 20 as:

"the BDFL’s guiding principles for Python’s design [in] 20 aphorisms, only 19 of which have been written down." 

In keeping with Python's early sense of fun these principles are laid out as a poem which is recited in full the documentary.

More Information

Cult Repo

Pep 20 - The Zen of Python

Related Articles

Cult.Repo's Python Documentary Coming Soon 

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