Python Creator Guido van Rossum Leaves Google For Dropbox

New submitter mrvan writes "Guido van Rossum, the proclaimed Python Benevolent Dictator For Life, has left Google to work for Dropbox. In their announcement, Dropbox says they relied heavily on Python from the beginning, citing a mix of simplicity, flexibility, and elegance, and are excited to have GvR on the team. While this is, without a doubt, good news for Dropbox, the big question is what this will mean for Python (and for Google)."

Comments

Not a fractal of bad design

[tepples]

What's more elegant and nicer in Python than PHP?

Python isn't a fractal of bad design.

Re:What will he be doing at DropBox?

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK he was working on the Python part of Google App Engine, in particular the NDB API.

He has also developed Mondrian, a code review tool that was partially open sourced as Rietveld.

(Not a Google employee, so just going by public knowledge here)

Re:Python VS PHP

[dkleinsc]

I've professionally programmed in both Python and PHP. There's no reasonable competition - Python wins hands down.

A few of the advantages of Python over PHP:

• * The basic library of Python is coherent and well written. PHP's is anything but.
• * Python's syntax allows you to do the same thing as PHP with far less code. For instance, to filter an array in Python, you can do stuff like this:

  filtered = [x for x in unfiltered where x.foo=="bar"]

  In PHP the same thing looks like:

  $filtered = array_filter($unfiltered, function($x) { return $x->foo == "bar"; });

• * Python is massively easier to unit test: You can patch anything you possibly want, including system calls, it has fantastic mocking libraries and testing harnesses.
• * Python supports modularity and has since day one. PHP's closest equivalent, namespacing, was tacked on at the last minute and not used properly.