Pygrunn keynote: Homo ludens, python and play - Daniele Procida¶

Tags: pygrunn, python

(One of my summaries of the 2025 pygrunn conference in Groningen, NL).

Organizing a conference is a weird mix between it-is-not-my-job and it-is-a-lot-of-real-work.

When Daniele Procida learned python 16 years ago, he was often told that learning python is fun! And it is easy! Often when people say it is fun and easy, that you should be suspicious.

It actually wasn’t fun. There was lots of satisfaction, though. Solving problems is nice. He didn’t want to have fun and he didn’t want to be a great programmer: He just wanted to solve problems!

Fun, playful… Python early on had a bit of playfulness. Named after Monty Python, an old BBC comedic television series. Nowadays most people haven’t seen Monty Python on television and actually discover it through the programming language. How does an Indonesian teenager react to the unknown Monty Python jokes?

Same with python-the-snakes. Lots of book with snakes on the cover. Some playful, some aggressive. Some with dripping venom (that doesn’t fit with a constricting type of snake…). But try talking about “python” in African countries where Pythons actually are a menace…

His definition of humor: the surprising violation of an expectation of congruity. A momentary re-ordering of the world. It gives us a surprising delight.

Python itself is full of expectations that can be violated… He was originally baffled by the term “pythonic”: he was just wondering whether his code worked or not, he didn’t expect his code to be judged on some fit-in-with-the-locals quality like “pythonic”.

An exception means you need a rule. A holiday is something different than regular days. A “holiday from the rule”. The special depends on the normal. Fun is a “holiday from seriousness”. Then: how can “fun” be made the expectation? A constant low-level fun is not funny.

Johan Huizinga wrote “homo ludens” in 1938. Homo ludens, the playing man. See wikipedia. He says that play is the primary pre-condition of culture. But how? According to Daniele’s examples, the holiday can’t come before the work. You need to have an exception when there’s a normal. God rested on the seventh day, but that only could be rest because he actually worked for six days.

Culture? Players on a stage. Which has rules. A courtroom can be a sort of playground. A kids’ playground has some boundaries. Could there be something to Huizinga’s argument?

At work, you can receive clear outcomes: recognition, rewards. The same system offers penalties. Work is a relatively clear system. A framework of rewards, value, etc. Daniele likes his work (he works for canonical/ubuntu). He’s allowed to collaborate a lot.

What can compete with that? In the weekend or the evenings? Often what you do is unclearer. When is it finished? When did you do a good job? To do something at home, he has to get tools out of the garage and he has to clean up afterwards: just grabbing a laptop at work is much easier. Grabbing his guitar takes more work. And nobody thanks him for playing on it. It can be too much work even to take a holiday from work. To play.

Easy-to-start-with work with good feedback is always easily available…

There’s an asymmetry of performance, failure and accountability. At work, you can get negative feedback. At home, what are they going to do? Sack him? No. Why are people talking about gamifying work? They should be talking about “workifying”! That’s more attractive!

Open source: is it work or a labour of love? What about people pestering an open source project with unwanted contributions? The dance between maintainer and contributor. What when a state actor manages to get a malicious patch into a central piece of open source software (like what happened last year)?

Does this have to do with the difference between work and play? Could open source software benefit by some explicit rules, some explicit expectations? Social expectations?

Photo explanation: picture from our Harz (DE) holiday in 2023