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WHO IS GUIDO VAN ROSSUM
One of the best ways to introduce Guido van Rossum is to do it through his own words written on his GitHub page:
"I am a gawky and proud of it"
“I'm a nerd, a geek. I'm probably somewhere on the autism spectrum.
I‘m also a late bloomer. I graduated from college when I was 26.
I was 45 when I got married. I'm now 60 years old, with a 14 year old son.”
Dutch and eldest son, Guido was born in the town of Harleem on January 31, 1956 and is a computer scientist, creator and programmer. He began to be passionate about electronics and circuit design (first electrical and then digital) during high school, although the beginning of this passion probably dates back to his tenth birthday, when he was given an electronics kit.
Graduating from the University of Amsterdam in 1982 with a master's degree in Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Van Rossum (Van goes uppercase if he is called only by surname, as he often specifies himself) started his career working as a programmer at the CWI, the Dutch National Institute for Research in Mathematics and Computer Science. There, he collaborated, among other things, on the development of the ABC programming language and the distributed operating system Amoeba.
In 2000 he moved to the United States to work with Zope Corporation, an open source platform that allows developers with different skill levels to build web applications, and remained in Virginia until 2003. During this period he met a Texan girl who later became his wife, with whom moved to Belmont, California.
After leaving Zope Corporation in 2003, Van Rossum is hired by Elemental Security, where he was commissioned to develop a specific programming language for this organization.
In 2005 Van Rossum started working for Google, where he remained for seven years as Senior Staff Engineer, and then in 2013 he accepted a job at Dropbox, with which he ended his career in October 2019. Guido currently lives in Silicon Valley with wife and son, and is "retired and not looking for a job".
HOW THE PYTHON PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE WAS BORN
Just as it was for Linux, the birth of Python was mainly due to Van Rossum's great desire to do things: in the weeks before Christmas 1989, Guido was looking for a project that would keep him busy during the Christmas closing and, then, decided to write an interpreter for a new type of language he had been thinking about for a while: “a descendant of ABC that would appeal to Unix and C expert hackers" and able to handle exceptions and interface with the system operative Amoeba, one of the projects he worked on at CWI.
Although the Python logo (created by Guido's younger brother, the designer Just Van Rossum) represents two snakes (one yellow and one blue), the name "Python" was chosen by Van Rossum to recall his passion for British comic group Monty Python and, specifically, for their series Monty Python's Flying Circus, broadcast by the BBC between 1969 and 1974.
Van Rossum has repeatedly stressed how much Python owes its predecessor ABC, which is in turn based on the SETL language, and the work done at CWI together with other developers, including Lambert Meertens, who had spent a year at New York University to work with the SETL development team, before establishing the ABC design.
Although the first version of Python was launched in 1991, it was not until 1999 that Van Rossum clearly defined the goals on which Python was based, presenting a programming proposal called Computer Programming for Everybody to the US government agency DARPA, which stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and which deals with the development of new technologies for military use.
In this proposal, Van Rossum spoke of a powerful, intuitive, open source language of easy syntax.
WHY PYTHON IS SO POWERFUL
From the beginning, Van Rossum had a clear idea of what he wanted to create: an object-oriented language, a language capable of creating models of real-world entities. With this objective, he created Python, a multi-paradigmatic language, able to support not only the object-oriented paradigm, but also structured programming and numerous features of functional programming and reflection.
Within a few years, Python began to establish itself as one of the most used and influential scripting languages in the world, becoming the second most popular language on GitHub after JavaScript and before Java, thanks above all to some of its features: simplicity of writing, flexibility, and the dynamism of language
Python is considered an interpreted language, which means that since the Python IDLE (Integrated Development Environment) compiles one line of code at a time, it is easier to test its operation and debug it, even if this unfortunately goes to affect Python's performance, making it slower than other programming languages.
However, despite being considered interpreted language, its source code goes from a pre-compilation phase in bytecode before being converted into machine language, in order to avoid the reinterpretation of the source code every time and to encourage an increase in performance.
Version 2.0 of Python, launched on October 16, 2000, introduced two important changes that further favored the spread of the language: a garbage collector to automatically free up memory and support for Unicode. From January 1, 2020, after almost twenty years of honorable service, the second version of Python will definitely cease to be updated, and only the versions of Python after 3.5 will continue to operate at full capacity.
WHERE PYTHON IS USED
The companies that use Python are countless and belong to the most diverse sectors: Google, Dropbox, NASA, Nokia, IBM, Walt Disney Feature Animation, Youtube, Yahoo! Maps, Facebook, Netflix, Expedia, MIT, Spotify, Udemy, Uber, Amazon, Mozilla, Pinterest are only the most famous of a practically infinite list!
But Python is not only used by companies! In fact, it seems that already 40% of US schools have at least one Python course in their offer, which is also the most common language in American universities.
In addition, according to recent studies, in 2015 Python surpassed French as the "most taught language in primary schools" in the United Kingdom: out of 10 interviewed parents, 6 clearly indicated that they preferred their children to learn the Python language, rather than French !
It therefore seems that Python's destiny is to become a sort of lingua franca for programmers, although there are areas where other languages still dominate.
To put it in Guido's words, “Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom and nobody can read another's code; too little and expressiveness is endangered”.
CURIOSITIES ABOUT GUIDO VAN ROSSUM
Over the years, Guido Van Rossum has been named by the people of Python developers as "Benevolent Dictator For Life" (BDFL), a title that is given to open source software development leaders, typically the founders of the project, who retain the right of last word in disputes or innovations within a community.
However, in July 2018, Guido said he wanted to take a pause for reflection from his BDFL experience, and to date he has not retraced his steps.
For his work on Python, Van Rossum has received numerous awards, including the 2001 Award for the Advancement of Free Software from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), the "NLUUG Award" in May 2003 and in 2006 he obtained the title of "Distinguished Engineer" by the Association for Computing Machinery.
ARE YOU FEELING INSPIRED AFTER THIS READING AND EAGER TO LEARN HOW TO USE PYTHON?
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