A person. Guido Van Rossum - creator of Python

Guido van Rossum is known as the creator of the Python language. Since the creation of the language, Guido has been repeatedly awarded various prizes. In 2001, he received an award for his contribution to the development of free software from the 'Free Software Foundation', and in May 2003 he won the 'NLUUG Award'. In 2006, he was awarded the title of Outstanding Engineer.

Guido devotes his free time to family and self-education. He is a big fan of the series 'Monty Python's Flying Circus' (Monty Python's Flying Circus), it was in honor of this show that the programming language Python was named.

Guido van Rossum was born on January 31, 1956 in the Netherlands. From childhood, the boy was fond of technology: he was more interested in hardware than software.

He admitsthat can no longer remember why and how he began to get involved in this.

But such a choice was unpopular among his classmates. Therefore, the class did not understand his fascination with "pieces of iron." When Guido brought his own project to school, nobody cared. “This is an unpleasant memory,” says Van Rossum. However, despite the misunderstanding and disapproval of peers, the boy continued to do his own thing.

“I had a big dream - to create my own electronic calculator from discrete components. I never made a calculator, but I made a few digital clocks. And how amazing it is to do something complicated and see how it works. ”

After graduation, he entered the University of Amsterdam (University of Amsterdam).

Guido studied at the Faculty of Mathematics. But among other subjects was programming. As part of the training, students visited computer laboratories, in which mainframes were still working. The young man quickly realized that working with computers was not just part of the curriculum for him, but a really pleasant pastime.

If before his mind was completely and completely occupied by electronics, analog and digital integrated circuits, now programming has begun to compete actively for the resources of his brain. Guido typed programs on punch cards.

“It was a very slow and tedious process, but it was terribly interesting to figure out how it works,” he recalls.

Over time, a curious student abandoned electronics and was completely immersed in the wisdom of programming, since in the end it seemed to him more interesting. In his second year of study, Van Rossum realized that mathematics wasn’t easy for him. Difficulties were caused even by such basic disciplines as algebra and integral calculus. Then he decided that “serious mathematics” was not his thing.

Guido asked to change his curriculum towards programming, and they went to meet him. He began to study all disciplines that were somehow connected with computer sciences.

Protracted side job

Van Rossum could not miss the opportunity to get a part-time job at a university data center. There were very few places for students. Moreover, they recruited only the most talented of them. Guido managed to get a place. He worked there for more than five years, while he was a student. True, his academic performance began to decline. Actually, this was to be expected.

Work so pleased him that he simply forgot about his studies. So a budding student was on the verge of expulsion. Fortunately, his boss, and part-time professor at the university, saved the young man from rash acts in time. He convinced Guido to continue his studies, explaining that without a diploma he would not be able to stay at his favorite job.

In 1982, Guido Van Rossum received a master's degree in mathematics and computer science. After that, he worked at various universities and computer laboratories - both in Europe and in the United States.

Python

“In December 1989, I was looking for a project that would become a hobby for the Christmas holidays. The office did not work with all the equipment, and without the necessary resources, I began to modify the ABC, but during the course of my work I did not think that something serious could happen, ”Guido recalls.

It was then that he came up with the idea of ​​creating a new programming language. Python was conceived as a descendant of the ABC programming language, capable of handling exceptions and interacting with the Amoeba operating system.

Amoeba is an open microkernel distributed operating system developed by a group led by Andrew Tanenbaum at Free University of Amsterdam. Amoeba is not based on any of the existing operating systems, as it was developed from scratch.

Python was distinguished from other programming languages ​​by its simplicity, open source code, allowing any user to make their own adjustments, and simplified use of English. Despite the fact that the teams were slightly different from the languages ​​popular at that time, programmers easily mastered the language and after a few days were free to use it in their work. Among the corporations that now use this programming language are Google, Yahoo !, CERN, NASA, and many others.

Python supports several programming paradigms, including procedural, object-oriented, imperative, and functional.



Many popular applications are also written in Python, for example, the free LibreOffice office suite. On the basis of Python, several more programming languages ​​were created that were not widely used.

Guido adhered to several rules that largely influenced the development of the industry: the use of open source code, the use of simplified English, which allowed programmers from other countries not to waste time studying the language in depth, and the brevity of the code, its convenience for daily use.

Van Rossum was one of the first developers and programmers to advocate for the development of free software and the popularization of open source.

It was Guido who first used the humorous title “Benevolent Dictator For Life”.

Under his leadership are other users whose needs he must satisfy. However, provided that the number of users whose opinions differ from those of the dictator is constantly increasing, they have the right to secede and start their own development.

Today, Python is one of the most used programming languages ​​in the world.

Further career development

Since 2005, Guido van Rossum has been working for Google as a developer (continuing to devote half his time to Python). At the company, he was engaged in the creation of the Mondrian system, written, as you might guess, almost entirely in Python.



After 7 years, in 2012, Guido left Google to join Dropbox's cloud-based storage service.

In an interview, Guido commented on the situation as follows:

After seven years at Google, I was ready for any changes in the environment, and there was an offer from Dropbox. By and large, my work has not changed much. I still:

• spend 50% of the time on what I usually do according to my role as the Generous Life Dictator;
• I am an ordinary engineer in this organization (not a manager and I do not even manage a group - not Team Leader;
• I often do code inspections, develop architectures and designs;
• parse a lot of emails;
• write code in Python.

Work details are of course different. In fact, I did two things at Google: for the first two years, I worked on the first online code inspection tool Mondrian, which, although it was not open source, it spawned Rietveld. Rietveld is currently used in Python, Go, and Chromium projects. After that, I joined the Google App Engine, where I did a lot of different things, mostly related to Python. My last big project was the new Python API for the database, NDB.

At Dropbox, my first project was the Dropbox Datastore API design. Ironically (it's not my fault), the word “datastore” is also present here. Dropbox Datastore and Google App Engine Datastore have similarities.

Dropbox uses Python to develop its applications. It was chosen by Dropbox not by chance, but for the reason that it can significantly simplify the development process.

“From its inception, we at Dropbox have supported all of the most popular operating systems. But such a task is always a big challenge for developers: each platform is based on its own tools and programming languages, so you have to write the same code several times, ”said Drew Houston, one of the founders of Dropbox.

“We don’t have time for this, and fortunately Python came to the rescue,” continued Houston. “The features of this language allowed us to write code once and then run it in any environment.”

Python criticism

Guido Van Rossum disagreed with critics claiming Python was too slow. He stated that his applications written in this language always turned out to be quite fast.

People take a tool and write something incredible, and do something crazy while writing these incredible gizmos. Sometimes such madness is associated with a bunch of calculations, going around a graph with a billion social connections, or analyzing a trillion email messages or something.

Sooner or later, the matter ends with the fact that in one small piece of the entire created system all resources are absorbed. If you simply design it as a simple Python cycle, you will see in the end that it will become the bottleneck of your system. It is usually much faster to take this piece and rewrite it as a function or module in C or C ++ than to rewrite the entire system in a faster language, because for most of what you do, the speed of the language does not matter.

Python community and its prospects

In one interview, Guido Van Rossum talked about his relationship with the Python ecosystem.

How do you maintain a balance between the wishes of users arriving daily and long-term plans to refine the language?

There are quite a few key developers in the Python community who do a huge amount of work writing and verifying code. This group of developers has its own processes for finalizing the language. Over more than 20 years of work, we have found out for ourselves some limitations that guide these processes.

If we make changes to the language too quickly, users start to “lag behind” and complain that with each new version of Python their programs break. If changes occur too slowly, users complain that bugs are not fixed in a timely manner, and their wishes for revision will never be taken into account at such a pace.

So, this balance is very shaky, because for one person the speed will seem excessively high, and for another - excessively low.

Over time, a holistic view has developed on what needs to be added to the main project or library, and what is better left as third-party open source projects that people can use as needed.

Having understood all this, I got a huge experience. Now we have reached such a level that in the event of my departure, the community will continue to function normally. Developers understand what and why we do, how we make decisions. In addition, these decisions will be made in a reasonable amount of time.

And what will you do if you leave the community?

Good question ... I think about leaving, I think, what consequences will it have for me, for my family. But while I'm still thinking about the answer to this question.

Have you ever been bothered by the appearance of another promising programming language that attracts widespread attention?

This does not bother me. I see cycles that change the popularity of systems, programming languages, and software in general. She comes and goes. I don’t know what will happen to Python in 5 or 15 years, but I’m sure of one thing: Python will not disappear overnight. I hope that the language still has great prospects, it incorporates new ideas and adapts to the new environment.
Perhaps at some point some kind of project will appear that will borrow a number of ideas from Python and other programming languages, reworking them in some other way.

How did Python's prospects change after you grow a beard? How much does tongue success correlate with beard length?

Beard is absolutely necessary. Look at the fate of Perl - it's all about Larry Wall's perfectly shaved chin .