Oral History Of Guido Van Rossum Part 1
2 min readNov 17, 2021
The aim of this page📝 is to share notes from Oral History of Guido van Rossum, part 1 covering mainly the first phase of Python’s life up until roughly the year 2000.
- 0h:43min working for Netherlands’ pacific political party as a volunteer as a context for meeting with Lambert Meertens — the author of ABC
- 0h:51min lambert meertens and Angol 68 before his work on ABC — also on attending the class taught by Adriaan van Wijngaarden, the big shot behind Algol68 and the one hiring Edsgar Djikstra in 1952
- 0h:56min why ABC came to be — Lambert teaching Algol60 for years and listing its limitations
- 1h:12min idea for python based on experience and use case of ABC in ameba environment
- 1h:18min python name from monthy python as opposite to roots of ABC and Pascal/Eiffel. Pop-culture + shortness + familiarity. presents attitude.
- 1h:24min on python vs shell script
- 1h:29min ideas about syntax going back to the debate algol60 vs FORTRAN at the start of career
- 1h:31min uppercase language keywords felt like shouting and outdated (modernism of python)
- 1h:48min on indentation as a good idea that no other successful language has copied (haskell)
- 1h:52min what was borrowed from C
- 1h:57min why python is good for rapid prototyping — comes with batteries included
- 2h:2min dynamic typing — not lisp, not Smalltalk, ABC again
- 2h:15min 90s internet is built with dynamic lang because of productivity — js, Perl, python — not much respect there, only productivity
- 2h:20min what makes python scale so well
- 2h:27min python’s success on the web
- 2h:32min zen of python by tim peters
- 2h:37min start of open source and community
- 2h:49min on the process for proposing changes top the languages inspired by IETF RFC system (that is too strict)
- 2h:53min 2000 as a year of great innovations and process — PEP, web, community management, license and open-source discussions, etc. -
- 2h:56min on BDFL title and various forms of bis opensource projects (python, linux, apache)
- 3h:9min on growth causing slowing down of changes
