Guido van Rossum conveys the sad (and somewhat delayed) news of the passing of Tim Peters. It's hard to overestimate Tim's influence on Python. He's probably best known for writing the Zen of Python (PEP 20), but to me he was a mentor and language co-designer long before that. Tim found Python not long after its initial release. His first deed was to convince me that Python should support mixed arithmetic between int and float, because most users would expect them to work that way. And he never stopped contributing.