191–200 of 213 posts
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Wow if he really did contribute a lot (which I don't doubt at all) then how did Google let him get away? I'd imagine his lifestyle there was pretty nice.
What do you think Google could have done?
" the adventure found at a nimble 250-person startup like Dropbox becomes more tempting " What is the definition of a startup these days, anyway?
Billion/million rule is the cutoff for "real startup". It stops being a startup when, if acquired or IPO'd for $1 billion, a full-time entry-level engineer makes less than $1 million after taxes. For straight equity, that puts the cutoff around 0.2%. For options, it depends on the strike. By 250, new employees are getting much less than that.
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I think it's a good thing for Python that Guido doesn't work on it full-time, and instead keeps his hands dirty with other projects. It allows him better exposure to the experience and perspective of regular Python users, and the sorts of problems that they use Python to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
The App Engine team at Google isn't really "regular Python users".
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No such blanket prohibition currently exists.
Are any of those words weasel words? "blanket"? "currently"?
By "blanket" I mean to say that there's no organization-wide policy. I don't know of any specific cases, but I would not be shocked if certain groups within Google have stricter policies in this area.
I was just trying to be specific by saying "currently"
It always strikes me as odd when something like this happens. Guido is still working nine-to-fives and Drew never has to work again. Can someone tell me why a brilliant person like Guido isn't worth a billion dollars? Have tons of fancy cars and a fancy house? Has to work for another company?
Since when do language designers get rich? I can't think of a single person who got rich through language design.
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I use Ruby for light scripting on a Windows machine. RubyInstaller worked just fine and so do the irb shell and my scripts. Dropbox is a web app, so who cares about GUI toolkits? Perhaps you're right that the Python community tried harder, earlier, to support Windows and other non-UNIX platforms. But it's hard to imagine Dropbox actually selecting Python to build their web app for that reason. Maybe in their earlier…
You wrote 513 characters about a subject you don't know anything about. Why is that ? You didn't use dropbox, you don't know how it works (hint, what made it so popular is the desktop client that syncs your data in the first place. And it's written with wxpython.), but you felt compelled to write 513 chars about your ignorance and wild speculation ("Maybe in their earlier days blabla"). Then comparing apples to orang…
If you were actually here to contribute, you might give a concrete example of why Python is more cross-platform compatible than other interpreted languages (because someone built a better Windows GUI toolkit for it?), but if you just want to put down and feel smarter than someone you don't know, you're wasting your time and keystrokes.
The fact that you actually bothered to count how many characters I typed strongly suggests the latter.
I heard from a friend who talked with Guido this year, he couldn't let Google add Python to Android and Chrome, this make him disappointed.
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I honestly don't know why you'd need 250 people to run a service like Dropbox. Dropbox is a piece of software that could recreated in about a month by a smart hacker; and if you're using AWS, you don't have worry about the servers (so don't need a sysadmin/maintenance staff) -- so, theoretically could be comfortably run by a handful of skilled core engineers. Why are 250 people working at Dropbox? Is Dropbox overstaf…
> Dropbox is a piece of software that could recreated in about a month by a smart hacker; A service running on AWS with intra-account deduplication, with signup, referrals, billing and support, Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Blackberry, Android, kindle and web clients, all internationalised into English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish (both European and Latin American), and an API with six platform…