The Code_Swarm video is an interesting visualization of the evolution of the work done on the Python programming language and the people involved, tracing its evolution from late 1990 to mid-2005.
code_swarm – Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.
The intro for the video says:
In 1991, Guido van Rossum released his Python scripting language to the public.
This video will take you through the history of the project, compressed into a fraction of the time.
You will see the names of developers fade in and out of prominence, while the files they work on swirl around them.
Red files are core code. Blue files are documents. Yellow files are modules. The histogram on the bottom tracks the size and time of commits. When a person makes a commit, their name stands out. The files they commit also stand out. Files grow in size every time they are committed. Files and people gradually fade when there is no activity.
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Whether you think of it as “Practical Extraction and Report Language” or “Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister” (that’s my choice), we internet app developers owe a lot to Perl. It may have started as a little language that let its creator Larry Wall automate administrative tasks, but in the 1990s, its strong text-manipulation capabilities made it well-suited for producing dynamic web applications. Its success in this arena earned it the sobriquet “The Duct Tape of the Internet” and it led the wave of “scripting languages” — of which my current language of choice, Ruby, is a member — which function as the “P” in the LAMP stack. I think of Perl in the way I think of all those music lessons I had to take as a kid: it drives me crazy, but I wouldn’t be where I am without it.