Guido van Rossum
At some point in his career, Guido van Rossum received the FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software — one of two formal recognitions from major computing organizations that mark his professional record. Born on January 31, 1956, in Haarlem, van Rossum is a Dutch citizen who has worked as a programmer, computer scientist, software developer, engineer, and writer.
Van Rossum was educated at Stedelijk Gymnasium Haarlem before continuing his studies at the University of Amsterdam. Among his early professional work was involvement with ABC, a programming language project that preceded his most prominent contribution to the field. He went on to create the Python programming language, a role that has remained central to his public and professional identity.
Van Rossum uses the Dutch language and has built a career recognized by institutions in the computing world. In addition to the FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software, he was named an ACM Distinguished Member. These two awards, from separate organizations, represent the formal acknowledgments his work has received.
The designation of creator of the Python programming language continues to define how van Rossum is identified within computing. His receipt of both the FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software and the ACM Distinguished Member status stand as the concrete markers of external recognition attached to his career as a programmer and computer scientist educated at the University of Amsterdam.
Quotes by Guido van Rossum
There is an incredibly large spectrum of possible causes for program bugs, including simple typos, “thinkos,” hidden limitations of underlying abstractions, and outright bugs in abstractions or their implementation.
Mark Hammond is working in this area, with Windows Scripting Host. It is definitely an area where Python fits almost perfectly. That’s quite independent from Java, actually.
It’s easy to make mistakes that only come out much later, after you’ve already implemented a lot of code. You’ll realize Oh I should have used a different type of data structure. Start over from scratch.
If you’re talking about Java in particular, Python is about the best fit you can get amongst all the other languages. Yet the funny thing is, from a language point of view, JavaScript has a lot in common with Python, but it is sort of a restricted subset.
Modern programs must handle Unicode – Python has excellent support for Unicode, and will keep getting better.
Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom and nobody can read another’s code; too little and expressiveness is endangered.
Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom and nobody can read another's code; too little and expressiveness is endangered.
It's easy to make mistakes that only come out much later, after you've already implemented a lot of code. You'll realize Oh I should have used a different type of data structure. Start over from scratch.
There is an incredibly large spectrum of possible causes for program bugs, including simple typos, "thinkos," hidden limitations of underlying abstractions, and outright bugs in abstractions or their implementation.
Now, it's my belief that Python is a lot easier than to teach to students programming and teach them C or C++ or Java at the same time because all the details of the languages are so much harder. Other scripting languages really don't work very well there either.