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Interview With Python Creator Guido Van Rossum (techrocket.com)
The online programming school Tech Rocket just published a new interview with Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python. "Looking back I don't think I ever really doubted Python, and I always had fun," he tells the site. "I had a lot of doubts about myself, but Python's ever-increasing success, and encouragement from people to whom I looked up (even Larry Wall!), made me forget that."
He describes what it's like being Python's Benevolent Dictator for Life, and says that the most astonishing thing he's seen built with Python is "probaby the Dropbox server. Two million lines of code and counting, and it serves hundreds of millions of users." And he leaves aspiring programmers with this advice. "Don't do something you don't enjoy just because it looks lucrative -- that's where the competition will be fiercest, and because you don't enjoy it, you'll lose out to others who are more motivated."
He describes what it's like being Python's Benevolent Dictator for Life, and says that the most astonishing thing he's seen built with Python is "probaby the Dropbox server. Two million lines of code and counting, and it serves hundreds of millions of users." And he leaves aspiring programmers with this advice. "Don't do something you don't enjoy just because it looks lucrative -- that's where the competition will be fiercest, and because you don't enjoy it, you'll lose out to others who are more motivated."
Bunch of bullshit from someone who thinks he's too elite and smart for these languages. Let me out elite and outsmart you and throw some actual computer science at you. All these languages are Turing complete and in all Turing complete programming languages you can make anything from a total mess to smart and efficient code. And the biggest mess can be made in the lower level languages. In computer science, abstraction is progress. You are no longer writing in assembler are you? So using something like Python over C++ (lol) is indeed in most cases better software engineering, making software easier to maintain, especially as the project grows. 1 million lines of Python is easier to grasp than 3 million lines of C++, if you manage to look through the fast layers of nuts and bolts anyway. People who are snubbing modern languages are usually just people scared of change. It means an erosion of their old knowledge. And then they get nasty and start kicking against 'fanboys'. If you're scared, ok, but it makes you look very sad and lousy human beings if you try to revert that by damaging others while hilariously advertising yourself as the truly elite, which you are not. Go and collect some garbage and prevent memory leaks or overflows, while the rest of us actually build stuff. Like for instance all the stuff that made up websites over the past 20 years. Like slashdot. Maybe you should try to reimplement it all with compiled C++, the most crappy lower-lever language out there.