History & Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

  • Dave Halter for creating and maintaining Jedi & Parso.
  • Takafumi Arakaki (@tkf) for creating a solid test environment and a lot of other things.
  • Danilo Bargen (@dbrgn) for general housekeeping and being a good friend :).
  • Guido van Rossum (@gvanrossum) for creating the parser generator pgen2 (originally used in lib2to3).
  • Thanks to all the contributors.

A Little Bit of History

Written by Dave.

The Star Wars Jedi are awesome. My Jedi software tries to imitate a little bit of the precognition the Jedi have. There’s even an awesome scene of Monty Python Jedis :-).

But actually the name has not much to do with Star Wars. It’s part of my second name Jedidjah.

I actually started Jedi back in 2012, because there were no good solutions available for VIM. Most auto-completion solutions just did not work well. The only good solution was PyCharm. But I liked my good old VIM very much. There was also a solution called Rope that did not work at all for me. So I decided to write my own version of a completion engine.

The first idea was to execute non-dangerous code. But I soon realized, that this would not work. So I started to build a static analysis tool. The biggest problem that I had at the time was that I did not know a thing about parsers. I did not even know the word static analysis. It turns out they are the foundation of a good static analysis tool. I of course did not know that and tried to write my own poor version of a parser that I ended up throwing away two years later.

Because of my lack of knowledge, everything after 2012 and before 2020 was basically refactoring. I rewrote the core parts of Jedi probably like 5-10 times. The last big rewrite (that I did twice) was the inclusion of gradual typing and stubs.

I learned during that time that it is crucial to have a good understanding of your problem. Otherwise you just end up doing it again. I only wrote features in the beginning and in the end. Everything else was bugfixing and refactoring. However now I am really happy with the result. It works well, bugfixes can be quick and is pretty much feature complete.

I will leave you with a small anecdote that happened in 2012, if I remember correctly. After I explained Guido van Rossum, how some parts of my auto-completion work, he said:

“Oh, that worries me…”

Now that it is finished, I hope he likes it :-).

Main Authors

Code Contributors

And a few more “anonymous” contributors.

Note: (@user) means a github user name.