A person. Guido Van Rossum - Python Creator

Guido van Rossum is known as the creator of the Python language. Since the creation of the language, Guido has been repeatedly awarded with 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 spends his free time working with his family and self-education. He is a big fan of Monty Python's Flying Circus (Monty Python's Flying Circus), and the Python programming language was named after this show.
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Guido van Rossum was born on January 31, 1956 in the Netherlands. Since childhood, the boy was fond of technology: he was more interested in hardware than software.

He admits that he can no longer remember why and how he began to get involved in it.

But this choice was unpopular among his classmates. Therefore, the class did not understand his passion for "glands". When Guido brought his own project to school, no one had anything to do with it. “This is an unpleasant memory,” says Van Rossum. However, despite the misunderstanding and disapproval of his peers, the boy continued to go about his business.

“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 attended computer labs in which mainframes were then still working. The young man quickly realized that working with computers was for him not just a part of the curriculum, but a truly enjoyable pastime.

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

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

Over time, an inquisitive student abandoned electronics and fully immersed in the wisdom of programming, as it eventually seemed to him more interesting. In the second year of study, Van Rossum realized that mathematics was not very easy for him. Difficulties caused even such basic disciplines as algebra and integral calculus. Then he decided that “serious mathematics” is not his strong point.

Guido asked to change his program of study in the direction of programming, and he was met. He began to study all the disciplines that were somehow related to computer science.

Prolonged side job

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

The work gave him so much pleasure that he simply forgot about his studies. So the budding student was on the verge of deduction. Fortunately, his boss, and part-time professor at the university, saved the young man in time from reckless actions. He persuaded Guido to continue his studies, explaining that without a diploma he would not be able to stay at his beloved job.

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

Python

“In December of 1989, I was looking for a project that would become a hobby for the Christmas holidays. The office with all the equipment did not work and, without having the necessary resources, I started modifying ABC, but throughout the work I didn’t think that something serious could happen, ”recalls Guido.

It was then that he had 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 micronuclear distributed operating system developed by a group led by Andrew Tanenbaum at the Amsterdam Free University. 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, giving any user the opportunity to make his own corrections, and the simplified use of English. Despite the fact that the teams were somewhat different from the languages ​​that were popular at that time, programmers easily mastered the language and were able to use it in their work within a few days. 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 office suite LibreOffice. 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 code, the use of simplified English, which allowed programmers from other countries not to waste time on in-depth study of the language, and the brevity of the code, its convenience for daily use.

Van Rossum was one of the first developers and programmers who advocated the development of free software and the popularization of open source.

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

Under his leadership are other users whose needs he must meet. However, provided that the number of users whose opinion differs from the dictator’s opinion is constantly increasing, they have the right to separate and start their own development.

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

Further career development

Since 2005, Guido van Rossum worked at Google as a developer (continuing to devote half of his working time to Python). In the company, he was engaged in the creation of the Mondrian system, written, as you can guess, almost entirely in the Python language.



After 7 years, in 2012, Guido left Google to join the Dropbox cloud storage service.

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

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

• spend 50% of my 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 or even lead a group - not Team Leader;
• I often do code review, I develop architecture and design;
• parse a lot of emails;
• I am writing Python code.

The details of the work certainly differ. In fact, I did two things on Google: At first, I worked on the first online code inspection tool (code review) Mondrian, which, although not open source, spawned Rietveld. Rietveld is now 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 a new Python API for database, NDB.

At Dropbox, my first project was the design of the Dropbox Datastore API. Ironically (I'm not guilty), the word "datastore" is also present here. There are common features in Dropbox Datastore and Google App Engine Datastore.

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

“Since its inception, we have supported all the most popular operating systems at Dropbox. 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 one of the founders of Dropbox, Drew Houston.

“We don’t have time for this, and fortunately Python came to the rescue,” Houston continued. “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 who argued that Python was too slow. He stated that his applications written in this language were always quite fast.

People take a tool and write something incredible, and do something crazy while writing these incredible things. Sometimes this kind of insanity is associated with a bunch of calculations, bypassing a graph with a billion social connections or analyzing a trillion e-mails or something.

Sooner or later the case ends with the fact that all the resources are absorbed by one small piece of the entire created system. If you ingenuously design it as a simple Python cycle, you will eventually see that it will become a bottleneck in 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 whole system in a faster language, since for most of what you do, the speed of the language does not matter.

Python community and its prospects

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

How do you balance the wishes of users coming in daily and long-term plans for finalizing the language?

There are a lot of key developers in the Python community who do a huge amount of writing and checking code. In this group of developers, their own processes for language refinement have been established. For more than 20 years of work, we have found out for ourselves some of the limitations that guide these processes.

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

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

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

Having understood all this, I got a great experience. Now we have reached such a level that, if I leave, the community will continue to function as usual. Developers understand what we are doing and why, how we make decisions. In addition, these decisions will be made in a reasonable time.

And what will you do if you leave the community?

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

Have you ever been disturbed by the emergence of another promising programming language that attracts everyone's attention?

It doesn't 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 with Python in 5 or 15 years, but I am 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 stage there will be some project that borrows a number of ideas from Python and other programming languages, reworking them in some other way.

How did the perspective of Python change after you grew your beard? How does the success of the language correlate with the length of the beard?

A beard is absolutely necessary. Look at the fate of Perl - it's all about Larry Walla's perfect shaved chin.