I’m having breakfast at a semi-regular coffee shop in Nashville, working on some Python bytecode-related black magic when the thought hits me: I want to tell someone about this, but who?

Given my experience in psychology research, my first instinct would be to write up a very scholarly paper and send it off for hopeful publication in a peer-reviewed journal or something. I somehow doubt, however, that any decent computer science journal would care about my Python ninja bytecode skills. What I needed, it seemed, was a computer science journal dedicated to Python.

The perl community already has one of these, appropriately titled The Perl Review. Published every three months, it features high-quality articles that show some serious perl-foo. As I understand it, these articles are generally written specifically for TPR and have to undergo both a stylistic and technical editorial process.

I’d like to see something like this happen for the Python world. I want some way of reading about cool stuff being done with and to Python, of finding articles with real technical merit. The status quo of Python journalism is blogs, with blog aggregators like Planet Python and Daily Python-URL being used to collect the mass of disparate postings into one place. I want some way of filtering the signal from the background static of the Python blogosphere.

In my mind, this “Python Quarterly” (name to be determined) would function on much the same lines as The Perl Review. There would be an editorial gauntlet to run, submissions would be expected to follow good writing standards, the whole shebang. Articles could cover any facet of Python development; some examples:

  • In-depth looks at some facet of the CPython/PyPy/Jython/IronPython internals.

  • Reports on experimental extensions to Python (e.g., Stackless Python).

  • Python development best practices.

  • Interviews with the shakers and movers of the Python community.

  • Guided tours of new or existing modules/packages. This would include not just how to use the thing, but also its motivation and lessons learned during development.

  • An op-ed page. This could be used (for example) to summarise any recent massive debates over the language’s future. python-dev, python-3000 and other mailing lists might be good raw sources for these.

Where would articles come from? Naturally, one source would be submissions that were crafted deliberately for the Python Quarterly. Another might be for the PQ’s editors to scan the various Python blog aggregators; upon noticing a quality post, they might invite the author to polish it up for inclusion in PQ’s next issue. Op-ed articles could be invited from the most vocal participants in recent python-{dev,3000,list} debates.

Other thoughts?