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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)."
Is that with or without a parachute? Because falling out of an airplane to a grizzy death doesn't sound so bad after you've been programming PHP all day.
You think PHP is bad? Why in my day we used COM with VB and C++, uphill both ways.
But just try telling that to kids these days. They'll never believe you.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Guido wasn't 'here's a box for you crap, you have five minutes before security escorts you out the door" fired. It was closer to 'we don't see a role for you here, quit now and save us both the hassle of having to let you go' type fired.
He has really accomplished nothing since he was hired. And needless to say with Google actively replacing Python in the company with Go, he was acting like a petulant ass.
Google is a strange place to work. It's entirely possible that, by the performance metrics they typically use, it was a mutual parting of the ways; I don't know, and unless you are on the performance review committee for his engineering subgroup, neither do you (and if you are, you should be keeping your mouth shut, instead of posting here, even as an AC). But assuming your theory is correct, don't mistake an organizational inability to effectively utilize his talents with him not having them.
That said, your second paragraph is basically BS. Go never really caught on because it did not have a cross-platform library; the reason was that it insisted on directly trapping its system calls itself, which is great, if you aren't an engineer with a MacBook Pro trying to do work at home, and want the same system call semantics for e.g. "kill" or "sigaction". Hint: at the top of Libc on Mac OS, kill takes 2 parameters; at the user/kernel boundary, it takes 3 so the kernel knows whether it should use traditional Mac OS signal semantics, or use POSIX 1003.1-2001 semantics (same as Linux). Until they drop Mac OS X for Linux (probably still running on Apple hardware), or the Go folks fix their language binding to use LibSystem (Libc) instead of trapping their own system calls, I don't see that changing in favor of Go adoption any time soon.
While Go is an "official language", along with C/C++ there are two others, one of which is Python, and not a lot of work was actually being done in Go. My last major project at Google was exclusively Python, and all of the testing infrastructure for Chrome OS is written in Python. One of the first classes you are offered as part of new employee orientation, apart from "How to use Perforce" is "Python Programming".
Personally, I could see him leaving as being part of the generally publicly announced Larry Page effort to focus Google on working on fewer total projects, and on hiring for specific roles, instead of just hiring everyone who met the right level of smart, and figuring something for them to do afterwards. But frankly, I do not see increased focus fixing what Larry's attempting to fix with it. I suspect this is more likely than your theory.
Either way, I expect his contributions at Dropbox will be valuable to them, and wish him luck there.
Google's search engine was originally in Python, but the company has since moved on to use Java on the front end, C++ on the back end, and Python has been relegated to glue code.
On the other hand, Dropbox has been using Python for its entire stack. I believe they made a few performance related contributions to CPython as well.
Guido is a great engineer (besides being a language designer), and still writes a lot of code. He probably would get more satisfaction working at a growing company where Python is a first class citizen rather than at Google.