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Thank You, Guido

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: Thank You, Guido

#21

Post by chooseaname »

exabrial wrote: post #12

> It is so intuitive and beautifully designed No it's not. Significant whitespace, underscores that mean things, lack of type system (but people treat variables as typed anyway), et all, make it quite a difficult language to understand. And we won't get into performance problems that it's cult following turns a blind eye to. I will say Python has inspired a generation of languages that got away from the C-inspired sy…

We all have our preferences. I find Python to be intuitive. I find Ruby to not be. I am sure someone would spend half a day trying to convince me otherwise, but, it's not worth arguing over in the end. There are more languages than most would care to count. Devs should pick a few that speak to them and move on.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#22

Post by ohduran »

I hated C++ and Matlab as an undergraduate. Hell, I hated programming as a whole - and effectively swear never to write a line of code once I was done with my BSc in Physics.

Then, at work, I was introduced to Python. It was so...obvious, for lack of a better world. It was like a language I always knew that never spoke before.

I'm now a software engineer, write Python almost all day, and looking back to the 18-year old version of myself, I would only say "if only you knew".

That, and more, is what people like Guido and those who followed his path enable people like me to do: enjoy the art of programming.

Thanks Guido, and enjoy your well-deserved retirement.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#23

Post by stochastastic »

Thank you Guido! At the risk of sounding saccharine, Python has literally made life better for my colleagues and me. In the corporate, financial world where I’ve been working, people often see coding as someone else’s job. Python, and the community that has grown around it, have made programming accessible (socially acceptable?). It has saved months of work for us.

I hope you enjoy whatever you set yourself to next.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#24

Post by dr-detroit »

exabrial wrote: post #12

> It is so intuitive and beautifully designed No it's not. Significant whitespace, underscores that mean things, lack of type system (but people treat variables as typed anyway), et all, make it quite a difficult language to understand. And we won't get into performance problems that it's cult following turns a blind eye to. I will say Python has inspired a generation of languages that got away from the C-inspired sy…

Since you brought it up I would like to pile on. There are scads of Academic applications that will remain in use for decades and every single one of them has a half baked Windows port that is used 10000% more often in research institutions where security concerns mandate managed OS not fashion OS or hobby OS.

I don't hate python just lazy windows ports.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#25

Post by glofish »

The genius of Python is that it treads that fine line between allowing too little or too much control. Between being too strict or too liberal. Between trading speed for clarity and simplicity.

It is the ideal programming language for an increasing set of tasks.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#26

Post by caseysoftware »

tyingq wrote: post #20
notkaiho wrote: post #2

"“When asked, I would give people my opinion that maintainable code is more important than clever code,” he said. “If I encountered clever code that was particularly cryptic, and I had to do some maintenance on it, I would probably rewrite it. So I led by example, and also by talking to other people.”" This is very sage advice.

Interesting in the context of Dropbox, as they ship the client code as obfuscated and encrypted pyc files and a custom runtime that's pretty "clever": https://anvilventures.com/blog/looking-inside-the-box.html Edit. Yes I get the difference and the reasons they do this. The wordplay crossover (cryptic, clever, etc) was notable to me, and reminded me of the link I posted above.

We're not the intended audience for the code. We're just the consumers.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#27

Post by Myrmornis »

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #4

To be honest, it is a sad moment, but it was expected. When Guido resigned from BDFL, I knew that it was the beginning of the end. And lets be honest, he's earned it. Thank you Guido, after learning Python, I never looked back, and it has been the source of great joy for me over the last decade.

He’s left Dropbox; he hasn’t died.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#28

Post by ajford »

exabrial wrote: post #12

> It is so intuitive and beautifully designed No it's not. Significant whitespace, underscores that mean things, lack of type system (but people treat variables as typed anyway), et all, make it quite a difficult language to understand. And we won't get into performance problems that it's cult following turns a blind eye to. I will say Python has inspired a generation of languages that got away from the C-inspired sy…

For a beginner, compared to many languages out there, it is very intuitive. I taught many 1st/2nd year college students Python as their first foray into programming, and it's flexibility and readability was a great way to get people in the door.

I won't defend beauty, as that's extremely subjective. I happen to find the whitespace significantly more intelligible than nested braces and parens, but that's me. I know plenty of people who strongly prefer to have braces and parens, so no argument from me.

Everyone loves to bring up performance as a huge drawback to Python, but it never holds up as a fundamental problem. Yes, that means for specific problems, it's not suitable. But the same can be said about many languages. Fortran is a horrible language to try and build a web framework on top of. Lisp is a bad language to write an OS in. Programming languages are tools, choose the right one for the job.

If you need blazing fast processing of numerical data, choose the proper tool. If you want fast iterative development with a broad set of packages and an active community, Python is a suitable tool.

I do agree that the growth in new languages is amazing, and greatly welcome them to the the toolbox that is programing and software development.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#29

Post by greenshackle2 »

exabrial wrote: post #12

> It is so intuitive and beautifully designed No it's not. Significant whitespace, underscores that mean things, lack of type system (but people treat variables as typed anyway), et all, make it quite a difficult language to understand. And we won't get into performance problems that it's cult following turns a blind eye to. I will say Python has inspired a generation of languages that got away from the C-inspired sy…

"Lack of type system". That is an absurd claim. Python is dynamic but strongly typed.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#30

Post by jredwards »

not2b wrote: post #16

Did you notice this: "He has already put into motion the conversion of the Dropbox server code from Python 2 to Python 3." Even the company that hired Guido is still heavily dependent on Python 2, and it doesn't surprise me at all; my own employer still has a lot of it in internal tools.

Definitely stood out for me. We haven't started that process either, but we're hoping to soon.
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