Guido van Rossum
Creator of the Python programming language.
Most quoted
"The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters: Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts. Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules. Although practicality beats purity. Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly silenced. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch. Now is better than never. Although never is often better than *right* now. If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea. Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!"
— from PEP 20 -- The Zen of Python, 1999
"The joy of coding Python should be in seeing short, concise, readable classes that express a lot of action in a small amount of clear code — not in reams of trivial code that bores the reader to death."
— from Blog post
"I'm a benevolent dictator for life, but I'm not a dictator. I'm a benevolent dictator for life, but I'm not a dictator. I'm a benevolent dictator for life, but I'm not a dictator."
— from Conference talk, 2008
All quotes by Guido van Rossum (330)
I decided to call it Python, being in a slightly irreverent mood (and a big fan of Monty Python's Flying Circus).
Python is an object-oriented language, but it's not an object-oriented religion.
I'm very proud of Python, but I'm also very proud of the community that has grown around it.
The Python community is one of the most welcoming and inclusive communities in open source.
Don't optimize for speed until you have to.
The most important thing is to get it right, then make it fast.
Python is a language for people who want to get things done.
Python is a dynamic language, which means it's very flexible.
The goal of Python 3000 was to fix all the warts.
I think the biggest challenge for Python is to remain relevant.
I'm a big believer in open source.
The best way to learn Python is to just start coding.
Python has a very strong standard library.
I never expected Python to become as popular as it is.
The Python community is a great example of how open source can work.
I'm just a programmer who got lucky.
The Zen of Python is a set of guiding principles, not a set of strict rules.
I'm very happy with how Python has turned out.
Python is a language that's used by a lot of different people for a lot of different things.
Don't you hate it when you're trying to debug a program and the compiler tells you 'syntax error' and you're like 'no shit, Sherlock'?
Contemporaries of Guido van Rossum
Other Computer Sciences born within 50 years of Guido van Rossum (1956).