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Thank You, Guido

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: Thank You, Guido

#211

Post by b0rsuk »

ohduran wrote: post #22

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 o…

On the upside, it gave you motivation to double down on Python to make up for the lost time.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#212

Post by bachmeier »

w-m wrote: post #38

There's a whole generation of programming language creators born in the early to mid 1950s. In no particular order: Guido van Rossum (Python), Bjarne Stroustrup (C++), James Gosling (Java), Rob Pike (Go), Larry Wall (Perl), Walter Bright (D). Makes me wonder what kind of secret club they have going on.. Enjoy the retirement, Guido!

A few others born in the 1950s that immediately come to mind: Martin Odersky (Scala), Guy Steele (Scheme), Robert Gentleman (R), John Ousterhout (Tcl), and (sort of) Simon Peyton-Jones (Haskell).

Re: Thank You, Guido

#213

Post by crimsonalucard »

3pt14159 wrote: post #79
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.

I'm starting to long for a stack that doesn't constantly change. Just set the features and that's it. Security updates only after that. It feels like a constant grind keeping up with everything. Containers, clouds, programming languages, operating systems, frontend frameworks, transfer protocols, it seems like it takes so much effort to just build something and keep it going. That Python 2 is still around doesn't rea…

Then how do you improve?

Currently there is no all encompassing theory for the design of languages or anything. So there's no prove-able way to design a language that can always be improved and always be backward compatible.

I imagine that such a language would be incredibly simple. Minimal syntax and all sugar and conveniences would be built with libraries.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#214

Post by bachmeier »

bachmeier wrote: post #212
w-m wrote: post #38

There's a whole generation of programming language creators born in the early to mid 1950s. In no particular order: Guido van Rossum (Python), Bjarne Stroustrup (C++), James Gosling (Java), Rob Pike (Go), Larry Wall (Perl), Walter Bright (D). Makes me wonder what kind of secret club they have going on.. Enjoy the retirement, Guido!

A few others born in the 1950s that immediately come to mind: Martin Odersky (Scala), Guy Steele (Scheme), Robert Gentleman (R), John Ousterhout (Tcl), and (sort of) Simon Peyton-Jones (Haskell).

And of course Richard Stallman (Emacs Lisp) and Joe Armstrong (Erlang).

Re: Thank You, Guido

#215

Post by wil421 »

aerovistae wrote: post #109
ohduran wrote: post #22

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 o…

> It was like a language I always knew that I never spoke before. God that's well put

Agreed. Learning Python for side projects and hobby stuff. The zen is real. It’s making me dislike writing JavaScript at my day job.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#216

Post by strbean »

lostcolony wrote: post #95
peterwwillis wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has to be a term for when the business builds something with one tech stack, and then later, as if it was totally by surprise, realizes it needs to replace the whole thing, for basically no added business-value, and this happens every few years. I mean, everyone has known they would have to do this eventually, but it just kept being put off, like the business is a bad procrastinator. And they all do this.

It's just delaying maintenance. We're bad at recognizing that software requires maintenance and periodic updates/replacement, same as anything physical. Businesses think once it's written it will always just work...and that's true if the underlying OS and hardware never change, and the business never changes, and requirements never change. But even if it's a completely niche application whose requirements never chang…

Add to that list "and there is basically one guy still qualified to work on the system", which is practically the case now for old COBOL banking systems. See http://cobolcowboys.com/

Re: Thank You, Guido

#218

Post by chx »

dexen wrote: post #101
3pt14159 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting to long for a stack that doesn't constantly change. Just set the features and that's it. Security updates only after that. It feels like a constant grind keeping up with everything. Containers, clouds, programming languages, operating systems, frontend frameworks, transfer protocols, it seems like it takes so much effort to just build something and keep it going. That Python 2 is still around doesn't rea…

Surprisingly enough, PHP is a good example of environment that doesn't break backward compatibility much. About the only change that had a significant impact on projects I worked on was removal of the 'mysql' DB extension (replaced by 'mysqli' and 'PDO'). For an older project I created a few shim functions and it still works just fine. While frameworks come and go, the core of the language is highly backward compatib…

Nowhere on the level of Python 2 to 3 but every minor version upgrade of PHP breaks Drupal core (and some contrib as well) one way or another. It's OK, we love the new features :)

Re: Thank You, Guido

#219

Post by brabel »

chrisseaton wrote: post #162
lvh wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agreed until the disaster that was Jigsaw. Maybe Jigsaw didn't impact you particularly hard, but you can't argue the JVM has a policy of minimal backwards incompatible changes given that debacle.

I work on Java at a really deep level, and I haven't had to interact with Jigsaw at all. What is it breaking for you?

A lot of things like older versions of Gradle (which at some point was a blocker to move to Java 9, but not now), Groovy (also fixed, but still has some warnings), which we use heavily for tests, several reflection-heavy frameworks (think dependency injection, annotation-processors etc), which to this day require some ugly hacks like --patch-module to "open" packages, JUnit tests (which also need the same hacks to work), even the location of resources loaded with class.getResource() had to be modified when modularizing a jar, so that resources go into the proper packages that are visible to the loader...

You seriously didn't suffer any of these?

Re: Thank You, Guido

#220

Post by depressedpanda »

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.

I, for one, would very much enjoy if posts about Python on HN didn't -- without exception -- contain threads about py2 vs py3.

We get it, some people are unhappy that py2 is deprecated. But whatever sympathy I might hold for that viewpoint is drowned out by the incessant and unproductive whining I keep seeing here.

Can we please move on now?

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