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Easter eggs · 23 of 25

Easter eggs

'import this' was a T-shirt slogan

Did you know 'import this' began as a conference T-shirt slogan?

· 25-sec read

Tim Peters posted his aphorisms on Python design to python-list on June 4, 1999. In 2001, Barry Warsaw and Peters were judging about 500 slogan entries for the IPC 10 conference T-shirt and picked "import this". Then they quietly added a ROT13-obfuscated this.py module that prints the Zen of Python, with commit notifications turned off. PEP 20 says there are 20 aphorisms, but only 19 were written down.

Why it matters

Culture docs stick when they're fun: the Zen of Python ships in every interpreter.

Sources

High confidence

Checked October 20, 2026.

  1. import this and the Zen of Python (Barry Warsaw) wefearchange.org
  2. PEP 20: The Zen of Python (python.org) peps.python.org