Guido at Google

[JB]

It seems that our master Guido van Rossum had an offer from google and
he accepted it!!

long life to Guido & Goole ! many things to come ;)

ju²

[bearophileHUGS]

This topic is discussed on Slashdot too:
http://slashdot.org/articles/05/12/2....shtml?tid=217

There are some interesting comments, for example from curious Java or
Perl programmers, etc.
Some of them can probably appreciate this:
http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/typecheck

Among the noise there is some signal too, there are lists of some
problems of Python. Taking some of those things seriously can be
useful, I think.

Bye,
bearophile

[Nicola Musatti]

Cameron Laird wrote:

In article <11************ **********@g49g 2000cwa.googleg roups.com>,
Nicola Musatti <ni************ @gmail.com> wrote:
.

Ah, the closed source days! Back then you could just buy the company
and be done with it. Now you have to chase developers one by one all
over the world... ;-) .
You propellor-heads (I write that in all fondness, Nicola) are
all laughing, but I'm certain that the right elaboration of
that proposition could make it into the *Harvard Business Review*
(or *IBM Systems Journal*, which seems to have tilted irreversibly
in that direction).

I was only half joking, actually. Compare Python to Delphi. If a
company wanted to acquire control over Delphi, they'd try and buy
Borland; to acquire control over Python what are they to do? Well,
hiring Guido and Alex is probably a step in the right direction ;-) but
would it be enough? Programming languages are not the best example, but
if you change it to Mozilla and Opera my argument makes more sense.
Actually, there's already a considerable literature on how pro-
grammers are like other nasty professionals in exhibiting more
loyalty to their community than to their employers. Generalize
as desired.

Well, it's still better than PHB's who, in my experience, are only
loyal to themselves and in general have more power to put other
people's jobs at risk than programmers.

Cheers,
Nicola Musatti

[elegans]

Of the three languages, Java, C# and Python, Python is my pet. c# is
very 90tyish and VS is showing it's age reminding me of Borland's
old c++ IDE.
Python represents the new direction in program language development and
has the needed flexibility.
I look forward to Google making Python, or it's sister into the next
industry standard. With 30 years of programming behind me, I have
always been fascinated by the gap between practice, wisdom and formal
programming language development, Python has narrowed the gap better
than most.

[Bengt Richter]

On 22 Dec 2005 23:06:43 -0800, "Anand" <ab******@gmail .com> wrote:

My newsreader automatically (and configurably) generates the above line.
Has a new reader come into frequent use that by default does not?
ISTM that I've seen a lot of unattributed quotes posted recently.

It's like having James Bond as your very own personal body guard ;)

That is such a nice quote that I am going to put it in my email
signature ! :)

-Anand

Maybe look into fixing the above problem while you're at it?

Regards,
Bengt Richter

[rbt]

Anand wrote:

It's like having James Bond as your very own personal body guard ;)

That is such a nice quote that I am going to put it in my email
signature ! :)

-Anand

Go right ahead. Perhaps we should do one for Perl too:

It's like having King Kong as your very own personal body guard ;)

[David E. Konerding DSD staff]

In article <11************ *********@g43g2 000cwa.googlegr oups.com>, Greg Stein wrote:

Guido would acknowledge a query, but never announce it. That's not his
style.

This should have a positive impact on Python. His job description has a
*very* significant portion of his time dedicated specifically to
working on Python. (much more than his previous "one day a week" jobs
have given him)

Well, given that he's going to be spending his 80% time working on python,
it makes one wonder how he'll be spending his 20% time :-)

Dave

[Alex Martelli]

Nicola Musatti <ni************ @gmail.com> wrote:
...

Ah, the closed source days! Back then you could just buy the company
and be done with it. Now you have to chase developers one by one all
over the world... ;-)

.
You propellor-heads (I write that in all fondness, Nicola) are
all laughing, but I'm certain that the right elaboration of
that proposition could make it into the *Harvard Business Review*
(or *IBM Systems Journal*, which seems to have tilted irreversibly
in that direction).

I was only half joking, actually. Compare Python to Delphi. If a
company wanted to acquire control over Delphi, they'd try and buy
Borland; to acquire control over Python what are they to do? Well,
hiring Guido and Alex is probably a step in the right direction ;-) but
would it be enough? Programming languages are not the best example, but
if you change it to Mozilla and Opera my argument makes more sense.

Not a bad point at all, although perhaps not entirely congruent to open
source: hiring key developers has always been a possibility (net of
non-compete agreements, but I'm told California doesn't like those).
E.g., Microsoft chose to hire Anders Hejlsberg away from Borland (to
develop J++, the WFC, and later C# and other key parts of dotNet) rather
than buying Borland and adapting Delphi; while acquiring companies is
often also a possibility (e.g., Novell chose to buy SuSE GmbH, rather
than trying to hire specific people off it, despite SuSE's roots in open
source and free software).
Alex

[Luis M. González]

rbt wrote:

Go right ahead. Perhaps we should do one for Perl too:

It's like having King Kong as your very own personal body guard ;)

Good analogy:
You know, they call Perl the "eight-hundred-pound gorilla" of scripting
languages.
Although most of the time, it would be a a very unsuitable body guard
(can't get into a car, into a plane, go to a party, etc..).

OTHOH James Bond is always perfect. He would sleep with your wife
though...

[Steve Holden]

Alex Martelli wrote:

Nicola Musatti <ni************ @gmail.com> wrote:
...

Ah, the closed source days! Back then you could just buy the company
and be done with it. Now you have to chase developers one by one all
over the world... ;-)

.
You propellor-heads (I write that in all fondness, Nicola) are
all laughing, but I'm certain that the right elaboration of
that proposition could make it into the *Harvard Business Review*
(or *IBM Systems Journal*, which seems to have tilted irreversibly
in that direction).

I was only half joking, actually. Compare Python to Delphi. If a
company wanted to acquire control over Delphi, they'd try and buy
Borland; to acquire control over Python what are they to do? Well,
hiring Guido and Alex is probably a step in the right direction ;-) but
would it be enough? Programming languages are not the best example, but
if you change it to Mozilla and Opera my argument makes more sense.

Not a bad point at all, although perhaps not entirely congruent to open
source: hiring key developers has always been a possibility (net of
non-compete agreements, but I'm told California doesn't like those).
E.g., Microsoft chose to hire Anders Hejlsberg away from Borland (to
develop J++, the WFC, and later C# and other key parts of dotNet) rather
than buying Borland and adapting Delphi; while acquiring companies is
often also a possibility (e.g., Novell chose to buy SuSE GmbH, rather
than trying to hire specific people off it, despite SuSE's roots in open
source and free software).

The essential difference, it seems to me, is that buying the company
gets you control over the company's proprietary technologies, whereas
hiring the developer only gets you access to the development skills of
the people who've been involved open source developments.

The open source projects remain outwith the control of the company; I
don't expect Google's employment of Guido to have a significant effect
on the development directions for Python. I'm happy to say I *do* expect
Python's development rate to improve hereafter.

I'm also happy that Google are a significant and public supporter of the
Python Software Foundation through (among other things) their sponsor
membership of the Foundation, and their sponsorship of PyCon.

regards
Steve
--
Steve Holden [phone] [phone]
Holden Web LLC www.holdenweb.com
PyCon TX 2006 www.python.org/pycon/

[rbt]

Luis M. González wrote:

rbt wrote:

Go right ahead. Perhaps we should do one for Perl too:

It's like having King Kong as your very own personal body guard ;)

Good analogy:
You know, they call Perl the "eight-hundred-pound gorilla" of scripting
languages.

Absolutely. It's big, hairy, smelly, a bit dense at times and always
difficult to communicate with, but by god it gets the job done albeit in
a messy sort of way ;)