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I’m ploughing through “Learning Python” in what little spare time I have these days, and so I was particularly interested to see this on the O’Reilly Radar site, an embed of Michael Ogawa’s Flash visualization movie of the development of the Python language based upon its source code repository history.

OK, that may not sound particularly exciting, but give it a whirl at full-screen, there’s something fascinating, organic and compelling about it. It’s particularly interesting to watch Python’s popularity explode in mid-2000.

code_swarm - Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

Michael has created visualizations for the Apache, PostgreSQL and Eclipse projects as well.

Edit: From a comment left on the Radar site, it seems that the explosion of popularity in mid-2000 followed the movement of the Python CVS tree from a private server to a public one at SourceForge. It seems, therefore, that this video could also be billed as the effect on a project of such a move, itself a pretty interesting thing, not least because it is the visualization of a phenomenon that is slowly but surely has been steadily supplanting proprietary software as the dominant software creation model.

Dominic Connor writes on The RegDeveloper about the battle for hearts and minds in higher education computing departments:

“University computer science departments are rapidly becoming Microsoft-free zones, as Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) combine with Java to become the de-facto standard environment for students of programming.

Microsoft knows from history that this will be fatal in the long term, hence its decision to extend free availability of core development tools to students. Most of my generation of computer science students quite literally never touched any IBM kit, even though - back then - it had a bigger share of the IT market than today is enjoyed by Microsoft, Dell and Hewlett-Packard put together.

We did C and Unix, and as we spread like plague rats out into employers, infecting them with the new wave …”

Dominic makes a particularly interesting point about the scope of Microsoft’s efforts in his concluding paragraph, but I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t read it. The full article is here.

Interesting, the locations on Audrey Tang’s (Perl 6 lead architect) visitor map presumably represent a geography or current Perl use.