1952–2026
Tim Peters
Python's second user. Author of the Zen of Python. Inventor of the sort that runs inside Python, Java, Android and Chrome. And for a generation of programmers, the impossibly patient voice on the mailing list who answered your question better than you asked it, usually with a <wink>.
In his words, and others'
"…modestly called timsort (hey, I earned it <wink>)."Tim Peters, listsort.txt
"Any Python project started between 1995 and 2010 has a bit of Tim culture in it."A commenter in the python.org memorial thread, November 2026
Tim's sort is probably running right now
Timsort's insight was that real data is rarely random. Logs arrive in time order, a leaderboard changes a little each day, and two sorted lists get glued together. Tim built a sort that rewards that structure and still stays within a whisker of the theoretical best on random input. Then it spread:
Timeline
The Great Timbot Conspiracy
On comp.lang.python in the late 1990s, Tim's replies came so fast, so thorough and so kind that the community built a running joke: the "Timbot" was surely an automated program, possibly hidden somewhere in Zope or IDLE. He played along. His signature <wink> marked the jokes. His long, careful explanations taught a generation how floating point, dictionaries and sorting really work.
His design notes still ship with CPython: listsort.txt for the sort, plus notes on dictionaries and weak references. They are some of the most readable technical writing in open source. Colleagues remember someone brilliant who was never dismissive of anyone.