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 joy of programming is in seeing your ideas come to life.
Don't optimize prematurely. Make it work, then make it fast.
Python's strength is its community.
I'm always learning. That's the beauty of this field.
The biggest challenge is often not the technical problem, but the human one.
I've always tried to keep Python simple, even when it meant saying 'no' to good ideas.
The Zen of Python is a distillation of my design philosophy.
I'm not afraid to admit when I'm wrong.
I want Python to be a language that people enjoy using.
Open source is about collaboration and sharing.
My biggest regret is probably not having more time to code.
The future of Python is in the hands of its community.
I've always been driven by curiosity.
The power of a language comes from its expressiveness.
I believe in empowering developers.
Python is a language for everyone.
The most important thing is to have fun.
I'm constantly amazed by what people do with Python.
Simplicity is not easy to achieve.
I've always tried to build things that are useful.
Contemporaries of Guido van Rossum
Other Computer Sciences born within 50 years of Guido van Rossum (1956).