Initially named pyqpl, work on pyQuil started in June of 2016 at Rigetti Computing as a way to
make Quil easier to write and generate. The project grew out of an initial proof-of-concept by
Robert Smith, and was immediately and substantially grown into fuller project by him,
Will Zeng, and Spike Curtis.
The mathematical functionality of pyQuil started with an algebra module for manipulating Pauli operators, which was contributed by Nick Rubin. With this, he authored the first larger-scale non-trivial algorithms using pyQuil, such as VQE and QAOA. The algorithms module has since been released as a separate project called Grove.
After about 300 commits, the git history was removed for release.
We give special thanks to Anthony Polloreno, Peter Karalekas, Nikolas Tezak, and Chris Osborn for their contributions, use, and rigorous testing of pyQuil prior to its initial public release.
As part of the launch of Quantum Cloud Services, there was an internally-maintained branch of pyQuil for prototyping the new quantum programming interface optimized to support the variational execution model. Once QCS was launched, and pyQuil 2.0 released alongside it, all the work on this branch was squashed into a single commit. However, this commit was the culmination of months of work by many people, including Matthew Harrigan, Eric Peterson, Nikolas Tezak, Lauren Capelluto, Peter Karalekas, and Robert Smith.
Over the course of its history, pyQuil has had a few different maintainers, each of who were in charge of pull-request review and the release process for an extended period of time. In reverse chronological order, they are Peter Karalekas, Matthew Harrigan, Steven Heidel, and Will Zeng.