Guido van Rossum

Creator of the Python programming language

• Born: January 31, 1956
• Place of Birth: Haarlem, North Holland, Netherlands

Introduction

Guido van Rossum created Python, one of the most popular scripting languages for the internet. Originally released in 1991, Python takes its name from the comedy group Monty Python and began as a hobby. Although Python has become one of the most widely used languages in internet applications, van Rossum gave no thought to its practical ends when designing it; he was more interested in principles of programming language design than in the purposes to which that language was put.

Early Life

Guido van Rossum was born on January 31, 1956, in Haarlem, the Netherlands. His brother Just, ten years his junior, also became a computer programmer and a typeface designer. Although Guido did not know what a computer was until he went to college, he tinkered with electronics as a boy and hoped to learn how to build his own calculator in school.

Van Rossum attended the University of Amsterdam, where he earned a master's degree in mathematics and computer science in 1982. While at the university, he was introduced to computers and learned to use punch cards: the IBM 80-column format, which originated in 1928. The first language he learned to program in was ALGOL 60, after which he began to study Pascal. As much as programming, he was interested in studying different programming languages and the different concepts they used, and he began to learn Fortran, Lisp, BASIC, and COBOL. Practical ends of programming interested him much less than the languages themselves, although he did write a program for John Horton Conway's Game of Life.

Van Rossum worked for a number of research institutes in the Netherlands and the United States, including Centrum Wiskunde and Informatica, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (as a guest researcher on mobile agents in distributed systems). He wrote a glob() routine (a pattern-matching routine) for BSD Unix in 1986 and was involved in the development of the ABC programming language.

ABC is a general-purpose programming environment like Pascal or BASIC, with support for top-down programming. Mainly used as a teaching or tutorial language, it does not have direct access to the file system or operating system and is not a systems-programming language. It consists of only five data types: numbers, texts (strings), compounds (records without field names), lists, and tables. The programs are much smaller than those of Pascal, and defined functions, procedures, and global variables remain in the programming environment after logging out, so that there is no need to create files. The environment also suggests command completions while the user types, even user-defined commands. Van Rossum's work on ABC led directly to his creation of Python in 1991.

Life's Work

Python originated with Van Rossum's brainstorming while he was looking for a project to occupy him during his Christmas vacation in 1989. He decided to write an interpreter for a language similar to ABC and appealing to Unix and C hackers. The result was Python, a general-purpose high-level programming language with clear, easy-to-understand syntax. Python is one of the best-known multiparadigm programming languages, meaning that it can work with several different styles of programming, including structured programming or object-oriented programming. Some paradigms require extensions for support, but the language is intended to be extremely extensible—the opposite of ABC, which had frustrated Van Rossum for that reason. Python has a small core and a large standard library. Where ABC protected users by limiting some of their access, Python encourages innovation.

Van Rossum's funding proposal for further work on Python, submitted to the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1999, was called “Computer Programming for Everybody” and identified Python as a language that would be open source, with code in plain English, which was useful for everyday tasks and easy to learn.

Python found popularity as a scripting language for the internet and embedded in software packages. Python shipped with most flavors of Linux. Tech giant Google relied heavily on Python (the Google App Engine, a platform for web app development and hosting, used Python as its scripting language), and the original BitTorrent client was written in it, as was the popular music streaming service Spotify. Python also earned a following with artificial intelligence researchers and the natural language processing community, as well as the information security industry. The widespread use of Python is ironic, given that Van Rossum never had specific practical uses in mind for it and in fact said that he considered it a language with a narrow niche. Nevertheless, the language's extensibility made Python easy to put to uses that were not envisioned at the time of its design.

Python has influenced a number of other languages, including Ruby, Cobra, Go, Pyrex and Cython, Boo, and Groovy, which applied the Python philosophy to Java. That design philosophy—ease of use and extensibility—is an important part of Python, and Python developers often brought a sense of fun to their work. That sensibility was reflected, for instance, in Van Rossum's title in the Python community (as the language's lead developer): Benevolent Dictator for Life. (He stepped down from that role in 2018.) Code is considered “pythonic” when it flows naturally and fits well with Python idioms and “unpythonic” when it acts too much like code from another language ported into Python. By extension, the Py prefix is often attached to products that are Python-related. Monty Python references make their way into the community as well: The traditional variables “foo” and “bar” are replaced in Python with “spam” and “eggs.”

Python enhancement proposals, or PEPs, are part of the official process for enacting changes in future versions of Python. PEPs were adopted in order to better frame development discussions, by giving them the goal of drafting a PEP that could then be considered and weighed against its alternatives and ramifications—a process that focused Python development.

In 2005, Van Rossum was hired by Google to spend half his work hours developing Python. His first Google project, Mondrian, was unveiled in November 2006. Mondrian is a web-based code review system with a Python-powered front end, which Google adopted company-wide, replacing the previous e-mail–based code review method. The web-based system made sense for Google's shared development environment, in which every developer worked on code in a workspace readable by anyone in the company (automated processes record snapshots for archiving). Shifting the code review process to the web incorporated the strengths of web-based collaboration, which Google promoted through services like Google Documents. Rather than just exchanging e-mails back and forth, Mondrian allowed programmers features such as in-line commenting, statistics tracking, and task-specific dashboards. In the talk presenting the first Mondrian demonstration, Van Rossum estimated that developing Mondrian had occupied about a quarter of his time since joining Google and that the process of working on it had given him a crash course on Google technologies and the Google work environment. The name Mondrian, of course, refers to Piet Mondrian, a famous Dutch painter.

Van Rossum also worked on the Google Compute Engine release in the summer of 2012, an “infrastructure as a service” product offering scalable virtual machine computing capabilities through the cloud. Google Compute Engine allowed users to launch Linux virtual machines and to run their workloads on Google's infrastructure. The service promised strong security and data privacy, with encrypted data.

Van Rossum received the Award for the Advancement of Free Software in 2001 from the Free Software Foundation. He was named a Distinguished Engineer by the Association for Computing Machinery in 2006. By 2012, Python was the third most popular language on the social coding site Github, after JavaScript and Ruby.

In December of 2012, Van Rossum announced his departure from Google, and the following month he began working as a principal engineer for Dropbox, a cloud-storage and file-sharing company. He continued to work half-time on Python. In 2018 Van Rossum resigned from his leadership of Python, which he said was in part because the open-source development culture appeared to be stifling female and minority programmers, whom he chose to mentor instead. He remained on the language's steering committee over the next year, but did not stand for reelection to that post. In 2020 Van Rossum came out of retirement to join Microsoft, announcing that he would work in the company's Development Division on projects that would include improving Python. The project he headed was called Faster Python.

Personal Life

Van Rossum moved to the United States in 1995. He and his wife, Kim Knapp, were married in 2000 and had a son, Orlijn, born in 2001.

Van Rossum is a big Monty Python fan, having named his programming language after the troupe. He also is a fan of the film Pulp Fiction and has referred to Winston Wolf (portrayed by Harvey Keitel) as his favorite film character. Van Rossum was perhaps unusual among programmers in that, beyond Monty Python and Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he expressed no interest in typical “geek culture,” such as science fiction and role-playing games, and was steadfastly uninterested in video games.

Bibliography

Biancuzzi, Federico. Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages. Sebastopol: O'Reilly, 2009.

Downey, Allen B. Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012.

Geron, Tomio. "Dropbox Snags Google Exec and Python God Guido Van Rossum." Forbes Tech. Forbes.com, 7 Dec. 2012. Web. 28 Sept. 2015.

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Lardinois, Frederic. "Python Creator Guido van Rossum Joins Microsoft." TechCrunch, 12 Nov. 2020, techcrunch.com/2020/11/12/python-creator-guido-van-rossum-joins-microsoft/. Accessed 23 Dec. 2021.

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Tung, Liam. "Programming Languages: How a Team of Developers at Microsoft are Helping Make Python Faster." ZDNet, 1 Nov. 2022, www.zdnet.com/article/programming-languages-how-a-team-of-developers-at-microsoft-are-helping-make-python-faster/. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

Van Rossum, Guido. An Introduction to Python. New York: Network Theory, 2003.