Guido van Rossum
Guido van Rossum (born 31 January 1956) is a Dutch computer programmer who is best known as the author of the Python programming language.
Biography
In the Python community, Van Rossum is known as a "Benevolent Dictator For Life" (BDFL), meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary.
He was employed by Google from 2005 until 7 December 2012, where he spent half his time developing the Python language.
In January 2013, Van Rossum started working for Dropbox.
Quotations
On how he got interested in computers and computer programming:
That’s an interesting story. It was in the mid 70s. I had never heard of computers until my last year in high school. When I went to the University of Amsterdam with a major in mathematics, there were programming classes and a mainframe computer (a Control Data Corporation Cyber-170) in the basement, and within half a year I was hooked. Within two years I was neglecting my classwork in favor of writing and debugging programs in Algol and Pascal.
I remember writing an implementation of Conway's Game of Life in Pascal that produced output on the line printer. I used Pascal's sets, which were mapped to the hardware’s unique 60-bit word size, and implemented very fast bitwise and/or/shift operations, which I used to implement essentially the digital circuits for adding and comparing 3-bit numbers (this only makes sense if you know the rules of that game). I knew that kind of digital logic from my former life as an electronics hobbyist (which I gave up as soon as I gained access to the mainframe).
