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

[Martin v. Löwis]

Cameron Laird wrote:

Apart from a few very mild constraints that prohibit you from little
more than saying that you're Guido and you invented Python, you have
remarkable liberty to adapt Python to your own needs. Moreover, this
freedom is not merely a theoretical principle; *numerous* working
engineers have changed Python to meet their own requirements, and
quite a few of these "modified Pythons" are in production around the
world. I've heard Guido speak words of encouragement to others to do
the same.

And indeed, in the area of "Extending and embedding", this is one
of the strengths of Python. Nobody will object if you add additional
library functions, data types, etc, and still call it Python.

Traditionally, reimplementatio ns of the entire language have called
themselves differently (Jython, IronPython, PyPy,...), just to
distinguish themselves from (what they call) CPython. In all these
cases, the reimplementatio ns strive for compatibility with the
Python language and library references, so nobody object that they
call themselves "Python implementations ".

Also, nobody would object if you take some ideas from Python, some ideas
from other languages, and some of your own ideas, and call the result,
say, "Monad". If the language (syntax, semantics) is significantly
different, you shouldn't call it Python.

Regards,
Martin

[blumberg]

lazy bastard

[Bugs]

So when *is* someone (either Guido himself or Google) going to
officially announce that Guido has moved to Google? If at all?

Also, it would be nice to know from Guido's perspective what, if any at
all, impact this will have on Python?

Maybe here? http://www.artima.com/weblogs/index.jsp?blogger=guido Is
this Guido's official blog?

[Greg Stein]

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)

Cheers,
-g

[Robert Hicks]

You mean Jython is still going? ; )

Robert

[casioculture]

Ilias Lazaridis wrote:

Greg Stein wrote:

Yeah... we recognize that we could certainly open-source more of our
software. While we've released some stuff
(code.google.co m/projects.html), there is a LOT more that we want to

http://code.google.com/projects.html

do. Getting engineers' 20% time to do that has been difficult.
Thankfully, we know how to fix that and got the okay/headcount to make
it happen. (IOW, it isn't a lack of desire, but making it happen)

When a company like Google open's sources, this means simply nothing
more than:

- the software is not critical to their business (e.g. core-software)
- the internal resources cannot ensure further development

See IBM, SUN and others, which have done the same thing.

But even if we haven't been able to open-source as much code as we'd
like, we *have* been trying to be very supportive of the community.
Between the Summer of Code and direct cash contributions, we've
provided a LOT of support to a large number of open source
organizations.

I hope that you invest some time to _organize_ the Open Source Projects.

Starting with Python and it's project-structure (e.g. build-process) and
documentation (e.g. ensuring standard-terminology is kept, like "class")

e.g.: where can I find an UML diagramm of the Python Object Model?

Even Ruby has one:

http://lazaridis.com/case/lang/ruby/...bjectModel.png

-

And we have a couple other ideas on how to help the open source
community. We're working on it!

The open-source-community can help Google, too!

E.g.: Google needs an public Issue-Tracking-System.

I needed around 30 emails and 2 months until google-groups-support
removed a bug which broke(!) existent links to google archives. (cannot
find the topic. Simply search your support-archives to see the desaster).

With publicity, the team would have removed the bug within one week.

Cheers,
-g

And finally:

If Mr. van Rossum is now at Google, and Python is essentially a Mr. van
Rossum based product, then most possibly the evolution-speed of Python
will decrease even more (Google will implement things needed by Google -
van Rossum will follow, so simple).

I mean, when will this language finally become a _really_ fully
Object-Oriented one, with a clean reflective Meta-Model?

Thus I can see Python pass this this _simple_ evaluation (which it does
not pass in its current implementation) :

http://lazaridis.com/case/lang/python.html

-

I have around one year to await.

Will see.

.

--
http://lazaridis.com

Hi there, I wonder what comments you would have about XOTCL, or other
OO extensions for tcl, like snit, and dozens more. I looked at the
various scripting languages available to me and decided to go with tcl
as it seemed the most versatile. I can't find it on your page though.
Regards.

[x600y]

JB wrote:

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

Google is merely the new Microsoft and surely just as unethical
at its core.

And your spelling Goole is probably closer to the mark,
since it is merely the next ghoulish big company,
come to restrict our freedoms and blot out the sky.

[Kent Johnson]

Robert Hicks wrote:

You mean Jython is still going? ; )

Yes, I see the smiley but there are too many "is Jython dead?" posts on the Jython lists
for me to leave this alone...

Jython is going strong. Thanks to Brian Zimmer and a grant from PSF it is under active
development again and working towards compatibility with CPython 2.3. And of course the
current 2.1 release is extremely stable and usable as is.

Kent

[Luis M. González]

x6***@yahoo.com wrote:

JB wrote:

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

Google is merely the new Microsoft and surely just as unethical
at its core.

And your spelling Goole is probably closer to the mark,
since it is merely the next ghoulish big company,
come to restrict our freedoms and blot out the sky.

I beg to disagree.
Google is what it is because it creates good and useful products which
everybody enjoy for free. For doing this, they hire the best guns and,
guess what?
These talented people have to eat, like you and me.
Do you expect them to work for free?
Every company needs to make money, otherwise they would die.
But there are many ways to make it, and I think they are as good and
ethical as they can be.

[bearophileHUGS]

This is interesting. With more Python time in Guido's hands maybe Py
3.0 is a bit closer... :-)

I don't know if this is a silly idea:
A small part of the wealth of a modern state is probably determined by
the software it uses/produces, and a small part of this software is
open source or free. This free sofware is used by a lot of people, and
they probably use it to work too, etc.
For a modern government, paying a salary to few (20?) very good open
source programmers can make the whole society "earn" maybe 10 or more
times that money... (The money given from EU to PyPy can be an example
of this).

Bye,
bearophile