Indeed, as someone with some grey in his beard, it hits harder because these where names I was familiar with when I was young (and now I'm not), I've never really been in the python world but I've used it a fair bit over the years and so I've seen comments from Tim here and there, it seeps into your conscious over time.

There are a handful of names in the tech industry who will hit me particularly hard and among those one who will really make me pause.

They will leave behind work that continues to impact the world but given the choice I'd still have them in it.

In my case none of the work I leave behind is going to mean a real lot outside of the people who paid me for that and I'm old enough that the majority of what I've written over the years is now no longer having any impact (refactored or replaced after years) though I'm aware of one that is still actively supported now that is 17 years old.

Almost everything all of us do in terms of actual work output is transient but we do leave memories, I have a mental list of programmers I've worked with over the years who left a last impact and while none of them afaik had the impact of Tim Peters broadly they did narrowly for me at least.

> slowly being piped to /dev/random.

Some are gently deallocated. Others are garbage-collected.