I was fortunate enough to work with Guido, albeit briefly, during my time at Dropbox. He was always a great co-worker. But you definitely didn't have to work directly with him to get to know him, because of his commute choices he was always at work when breakfast was being served (food, the true high point of working at Dropbox) and the intersection of Dropbox culture and Guido's personality meant that it was easy just to go sit at the same table and have breakfast with him and get to know him.
Thank You, Guido
31–40 of 388 posts
Re: Thank You, Guido
#32To 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.
Is he retiring only from Dropbox or he is retiring also from the Python committee (or whatever it is call)?
Re: Thank You, Guido
#33> 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…
It's a blog post about the creator of python leaving Dropbox a company who uses a TON of Python. Did you expect them to complain about Python?
Of course there is issues, as there is with ANY language.
Stop these silly language wars...
Re: Thank You, Guido
#34> 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…
Python is well-designed for what it is, and it certainly seems intuitive compared to bash or perl or whatever people were using before, but it is opinionated in a way that makes it hard to write anything but procedural-style code. That quality draws some people to it, but it's not a language that can be everything to everyone.
Re: Thank You, Guido
#35> 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.
Python also can now be optionally typed, which the article discusses. More: http://mypy-lang.org/
Re: Thank You, Guido
#36To 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.
> Thank you Guido, after learning Python, I never looked back That matches my experience. All the pros and cons that in principle apply to any language, whether newer than Python or older, mean nothing to me in practice. Python is the one that feels right, the others feel like a chore. Since I started with Python 10 years ago, nothing has changed that. There's ways I'll insist that Python is the best at [x], and ways…
"But it never amounts to anything close to a debate about what language I should use."
So if your task was to deliver let's say commercial grade FFT library ( substitute with any other long computationally extensive process ) for consumption by others you would write it in Python?
Re: Thank You, Guido
#37To 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.
It's not the beginning of the end. Retirement is not a death sentence. Lots of folks go on to do some of the best work of their lives... not that Guido hasn't already done plenty of that.
I’m sure he’s going to take a break from the chaos of being at a unicorn in SF and the departure from BDFL, spend some time in the woods reading books and getting ready for the next thing. He’s got plenty of cash (presumably) so hopefully finances are not a source of concern. Then the itch will come and hopefully he will be poised to scratch it.
I’m sure we’ll see more from him!
Re: Thank You, Guido
#38There'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!
Re: Thank You, Guido
#39While reading the article, I found myself just playing with the top bar. This is a decently common pattern that I always find distracting.
Re: Thank You, Guido
#40> 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 pl…
You don't need significant whitespace to get rid of nested braces - see every language with a pascal-like syntax.