Hunting for Python Easter Eggs - Code Conversation

Key Takeaways

welcome to another real python code conversation I'm philli a real python team member and I'm going to have a conversation with Bartos who is another real python team member this code conversation is a bit different to other real python code conversations you might have seen the emphasis this time is more on the conversation part BOS will take you on an Easter egg hunt you'll learn about the history of software development and some hidden gems in Python however there won't be that many code examples so you can treat this code conversation a bit like a podcast episode lean back and listen to the interesting things that Bartos has to say Enjoy when we're talking about Easter egg what are we actually talking about what has this to do with software development and why is this an interesting topic to talk about yeah in the traditional sense for those of you who don't know Easter eggs are hardboiled eggs which are decorated in various patterns and paints but they also mean something entirely different in the software engineering particularly video games and this is exactly what we're going to talk about today yeah I remember this from my childhood like we actually had Easter egg hunts in in Germany so when it was Easter Sunday our parents were hiding uh Easter eggs in the garden and we we kids had to wait inside and then you went outside with a little basket and all the kids needed to find Easter eggs and in the end you were comparing who found the most and who found the most interesting ones often there were not only boring boiled eggs but chocolate eggs which is a bit more interesting oh yeah especially as a kid right still as an adult I guess yeah and you were mentioning in software development there is something similar there are also little interesting details that are hidden somewhere in video game software sometimes even films and also in Python but maybe before we go into the python world do you know of any popular Easter eggs or some examples that our viewers might already know absolutely but before we do this I would actually like to go take a step back and explain a little more about the concept of Easter egg and software like you mentioned there was this game called The Egg Hunt game and it's a very similar Concept in programming so it's like a little game for people to entertain themselves and find some jokes and hidden secrets in software it's mostly about this eggun game which is funny because I live in Poland and Easter is huge in Poland but I've never heard of egg hunt game in my life before I literally asked my wife and she said oh yeah sure I know what that is you know from TV but in our childhood we never played that game so I was really curious to find out what it is all about and it turns out that yeah parents just hide those eggs somewhere and the kids are after them and the idea was with Easter egg in software is kind of similar where the developers the original creators put these secret messages jokes hidden something in the software and they don't tell anyone about it they just wait until someone discovers it and that becomes popular there are many examples in software that you might be aware of so for instance if you're using a web browser which is based on the open source chromium project like Google Chrome or the recent Brave browser you have to be offline to experience this so when there's no internet access and you go somewhere it displays this little dinosaur along with a boring message that there's no internet which is of course quite familiar and do you know why they put this T-rex dinosaur there I was always wondering I I thought it was maybe because Mozilla or something like that and having a dinosaur there yeah I was scratching my head once too and apparently it was an inside joke and they wanted to refer to the prehistoric times where there was no internet so when you have no internet access they show this little dinosaur to emphasize that it's like living in the prehistoric times these days without internet anymore that makes total sense and I mean this alone already is kind of like a little Easter egg because it's probably a joke that developers had but I guess there is a bit more to this dinosaur as well it's not just an image that's showing there yeah you're quite right right when you hit a space bar or your up Arrow key on the keyboard you can actually start playing the dinosaur so it starts this little game inside your browser to entertain yourself where there's no internet and you can jump you can Crouch to avoid the enemies and obstacles and score points so there's a little hidden game which you might have not known before and this is a great example of an Easter egg in your web browsers so Easter eggs are super popular in video games that's the probably the biggest type of software where you would go and find those Easter eggs but that's not the rule there are some professional software applications which also include Easter eggs perhaps one of the most famous ones was Microsoft Excel they featured a whole flight simulator that which is crazy inside Excel so you would type some cryptic message into a cell and then you would use a particular key combination and would open up this flight simulator right in your Excel which is quite funny given you know Excel is considered professional software for business applications and yet you can play game inside of it that is so funny I didn't know about this one and I mean it's like you can pretend to work on big numbers but actually you're playing flight simulator that's quite cool yeah but they they changed their take on Easter XG I mean Microsoft and at some point they decided that you know they want to to become a serious company and they removed all the Easter eggs from their software at least that's what they're saying so you won't find this flight simulator in Excel anymore unfortunately unlike other companies like Google for instance is still pretty big on Easter eggs if you go to a Wikipedia article that lists all the Easter eggs in Google products and services it's it's a pretty long list yeah I think that's a good example of the developers also having fun and not just publishing the corporate software but also leaving some like maybe little bugs in that are not harmful or or something like this and maybe Microsoft only wants you to think that there are no Easter eggs so if any viewers find some Easter X in a Microsoft product let us know in the comments below because maybe they are still out there do you know one of the first appearances of of an Easter EG in software development I know I checked the Wikipedia before recording this so that's how I know apparently perhaps the first Easter egg in software known to humanity is from early 1980s from a video game and Atari didn't want to credit their developers and they they wouldn't show the names of developers who were working on the game for different reasons one of them was because they didn't want other companies to go after their developer and there was one programmer who didn't like this he really wanted to be credited he wanted his work to be acknowledged for his efforts of course he secretly put his name in the game without telling his bosses so the player would have to do something specific in the game to find that secret room or something where it would display the the name of the developer and that's how the concept of Easter egg was created initially the company decided to remove it they didn't like it but you know it wasn't the internet times yet so they would have to release a new version without Easter that Easter egg but that proved to be too costly so they decided to keep it and actually they they liked it because you know the players also enjoyed looking after those Easter eggs so that's how it all started and one cool thing is that you as a python programmer and with you I mean you as a viewer but also so you BOS can still find some Easter eggs in python python is one of the places where you can go on an Easter egg hunt and that's something that we want to do today and find some Easter eggs in Python that's right any Journey as a programmer we often start with uh hello world programs and there are some things that we can actually uncover in Python but before we go to the Easter egg how does like a typical hello world program look in Python well in Python it's pretty straightforward you just call the print function open parenthesis and inside you put a string which says hello world exclamation mark and it prints the string hello world but uh it's interesting that you're asking specifically about the hello world implementation in Python because writing hello world in Python is fairly straightforward but if you ask me how to write hello world in Java I'm not sure if I would be able to do this at the first try probably it would take maybe two because of the complicated syntax that is true but there is even a way on how to get a Hello World message in Python without even writing code right yeah philli you're right it turns out there's an even simpler way to implement hello world in Python which doesn't even include writing a single line of code because python comes with Hello World built-in so you can actually run a module that is in Python standard library and to run a python module you type the python command whoops Python and then you supply the dash M option which stands for module and then you just specify the name of the module and it's interesting because you won't find it in the official documentation if I recall correctly but if you look at the source code there is a funny looking module name which is called double underscore hello double underscore or using Python's lingo the double underscore is often abbreviated to Dunder so it's Dunder hello Dunder and if I hit enter it's will well print the hello world so someone already has implemented hello world for us in Python the dunder hello module is a perfect example of an Easter egg because it's concealed if you go to the official python documentation you won't be able to find it for example if you navigate to the docs. python.org and typed under hello it won't show up because even though it's in Python it's not documented on purpose but since you're running python locally you can find that file and view its source code you could also go to cpython source code on GitHub and look it up there but um probably the quickest way would be to use something like bpy which is a cool little wrapper around the standard python repple or read evaluate print Loop and when you import something like thunder hello and then you use a keyboard shortcut under your csor I think it's the default one is F2 it will show you the source code in here we can see we have some variable called initialized we have a few classes and the main function and it turns out that these few classes aren't completely useless because they're actually used in the unit test in Python if I recall correctly M so this module isn't just an Easter egg it's actually being used by the unit test in Python and then we have the main function which is the entry point to that module which means that when you run this module the way I showed it before using python dasm option it will run the main function in here and it will print the hello world text on the screen