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'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
Readability counts. If the code is difficult to understand, it's probably difficult to maintain.
There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things.
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. (Unless you're debugging, then go alone and suffer.)
I decided to call it Python because I'm a big fan of Monty Python's Flying Circus.
I'm the Benevolent Dictator for Life. That means I get to make the final decision. And sometimes, I even listen to others.
Python is like a Swiss Army knife. It has a lot of tools, and you can use it for almost anything. But sometimes you just need a hammer.
My main motivation for Python was to get rid of curly braces.
The best way to predict the future is to implement it.
I'm not a fan of magic. I like things to be explicit and understandable.
If you think you understand it, you probably don't. Read the docs again.
Python is a language for adults. You can do whatever you want, but you're responsible for the consequences.
The only way to learn a new programming language is to write programs in it.
I've always been a fan of making things easy for the programmer, even if it makes things a little harder for the language designer.
Sometimes a feature is a bug, and sometimes a bug is a feature. It all depends on your perspective, and whether you're the one who has to fix it.
My biggest regret? Not making Python 3 incompatible with Python 2 sooner.
Python is a great language for teaching, but also for doing serious work. It's a bit like a bicycle: easy to learn, but you can go very far with it.
The best code is no code at all. The second best code is simple code.
I don't believe in magic, but I do believe in well-designed abstractions.
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. Or you're using Java.
Contemporaries of Guido van Rossum
Other Computer Sciences born within 50 years of Guido van Rossum (1956).