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)
The Zen of Python guides us: Beautiful is better than ugly.
Community is what makes Python thrive.
I never intended Python to be a systems language.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication in code.
Humor in documentation keeps things light.
Learning Python is like learning to ride a bike.
Version control is a lifesaver for sanity.
I regret nothing about Python's whitespace.
Software engineering is 90% psychology.
The best code is the code you don't write.
Python's indentation enforces readability.
Life's too short for bad APIs.
Collaboration beats solo coding every time.
Errors should be explicit and informative.
Python is my love letter to programming.
Flat is better than nested, as per Zen.
Debugging is twice as hard as writing code.
The Python community is my greatest achievement.
Readability counts in every line.
Innovation comes from necessity.
Contemporaries of Guido van Rossum
Other Computer Sciences born within 50 years of Guido van Rossum (1956).