Thank You, Guido

To be honest, it is a sad moment, but it was expected. When Guido resigned from BDFL, I knew that it was the beginning of the end.<p>And lets be honest, he&#x27;s earned it.<p>Thank you Guido, after learning Python, I never looked back, and it has been the source of great joy for me over the last decade.

I hated C++ and Matlab as an undergraduate. Hell, I hated programming as a whole - and effectively swear never to write a line of code once I was done with my BSc in Physics.<p>Then, at work, I was introduced to Python. It was so...obvious, for lack of a better world. It was like a language I always knew that never spoke before.<p>I&#x27;m now a software engineer, write Python almost all day, and looking back to the 18-year old version of myself, I would only say &quot;if only you knew&quot;.<p>That, and more, is what people like Guido and those who followed his path enable people like me to do: enjoy the art of programming.<p>Thanks Guido, and enjoy your well-deserved retirement.

This article is a sign of class, well done Dropbox.<p>I too have to say Thank you Guido. Python 1.5 helped me a lot with several projects way back when. Then I got into Django later, and marvelled at how easy it was to use. Now I use Python (and other things) for AI.<p>I am sad because of the motivation for Guido leaving the BFDL position, but empathize and understand. I hope he has fair winds and following seas for whatever journey he sails on next.

Language, its community and development model is a reflection of its creator and his philosophy. So Without meeting the creator Guido, through language and its community I can see is very humble and care about things besides solving computer science problems.<p>May be this is one of the reasons of success of Python and its community which is open, humble, friendly and inclusive.<p>In my startup we have been using Python as one of the primary development language, and thanks to its community and Guido, we will continue to do so in time to come.<p>I recently watched a talk by creator of Elm language [1] [2] who is trying to create similar community like Python, I will try it besides lisp, since I like the ethos of Python like community and obviously PEP-20 [3].<p>From my whole team thanks to Guido, and Python community.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;elm-lang.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;elm-lang.org&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uGlzRt-FYto" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uGlzRt-FYto</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.python.org&#x2F;dev&#x2F;peps&#x2F;pep-0020&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.python.org&#x2F;dev&#x2F;peps&#x2F;pep-0020&#x2F;</a>

&gt; For the last several months, Guido and Sushma have been meeting once a week to talk about all things programming. But Sushma says the biggest takeaways were not just about how to do things, but how to become more confident and learn how to figure things out on your own.<p>The part about Guido personally mentoring women engineers is, despite his (obvious) technical contributions, the most impressive part about his Dropbox tenure to me. The article mentions him leading by example and it&#x27;s inspiring to see someone of that stature and level of accomplishment willing to spend time with individuals. It&#x27;s one thing to talk about fostering a welcoming community, it&#x27;s quite another to offer up his time so generously when he could be doing &quot;higher leverage&quot; things with regards to diversity.

I was fortunate enough to work with Guido, albeit briefly, during my time at Dropbox. He was always a great co-worker. But you definitely didn&#x27;t have to work directly with him to get to know him, because of his commute choices he was always at work when breakfast was being served (food, the true high point of working at Dropbox) and the intersection of Dropbox culture and Guido&#x27;s personality meant that it was easy just to go sit at the same table and have breakfast with him and get to know him.

Thank you Guido! At the risk of sounding saccharine, Python has literally made life better for my colleagues and me. In the corporate, financial world where I’ve been working, people often see coding as someone else’s job. Python, and the community that has grown around it, have made programming accessible (socially acceptable?). It has saved months of work for us.<p>I hope you enjoy whatever you set yourself to next.

Someone who worked at Dropbox shared an anecdote. Guido received an email from some recruiter along the line &quot;You seem to have great experience in Python. How many years of experience you have with Python?&quot; To which he replied &quot;All of it!&quot;. I am not sure if it is true story.

&quot;“When asked, I would give people my opinion that maintainable code is more important than clever code,” he said. “If I encountered clever code that was particularly cryptic, and I had to do some maintenance on it, I would probably rewrite it. So I led by example, and also by talking to other people.”&quot;<p>This is very sage advice.

There&#x27;s a whole generation of programming language creators born in the early to mid 1950s. In no particular order: Guido van Rossum (Python), Bjarne Stroustrup (C++), James Gosling (Java), Rob Pike (Go), Larry Wall (Perl), Walter Bright (D).<p>Makes me wonder what kind of secret club they have going on..<p>Enjoy the retirement, Guido!

Thank you for creating an awesome lingua franca for a generation of programmers, engineers, and scientists Guido! You&#x27;ll never be forgotten. Love!

&quot;I think at his core, Guido is a person who is trying to help make the world better in his own way. I think that was his philosophy when he started programming in Python and mentoring women is just another way that he contributes.&quot; -- Sushma Yadlapalli about Guido van Rossum

I&#x27;m travelling with poor cellular connection and it took me 10 minutes to load this page, while I could load and read content on HN perfectly fine. The text content loaded LAST. That website is terrible.

Guido seems to have been incredibly good on the mentoring front, particularly with getting women into the community. I wonder if he&#x27;ll continue doing that at all even after he goes into &quot;retirement&quot;. It seems like a great asset to the community.

One of the things some of us learn with experience is that “clever code only the author can understand” is often a lie, too. I may be able to figure it out on the fly but code I haven’t touched in six months is less familiar than other people’s code that I touched a month ago.<p>When I leave hints in the code it’s enlightened self interest. It’s often as much for my own benefit as for others.

Off topic (sorry): Dropbox&#x27;s overall typography is blatantly offensive to the eye.

If we judge leadership by the quality of followers, python&#x27;s ecosystem says it all.

&gt; <i>When asked, I would give people my opinion that maintainable code is more important than clever code. If I encountered clever code that was particularly cryptic, and I had to do some maintenance on it, I would probably rewrite it.</i><p>It would be great to see some examples of this rewriting. I feel that we see a lot of examples of converting repetitive code to terse code, but fewer examples of &quot;de-clevering&quot; code.

&gt; The result of this is nearly four million lines of checked Python code, nearly 200,000 improved type definitions, and countless hours saved for engineers.<p>The more I code the more I appreciate statically typed languages.<p>When I learned&#x2F;started coding, I liked dynamically typed languages. It was easier to get past compiler. My code seemed to do something. And if there was anything wrong in the way, it would just continue to execute making me feel that my code is at least doing something.<p>Now more into programming, I don&#x27;t want to go back to duck-typed languages. I like when compiler gives me guarantees along with exceptions being thrown at runtime when something goes wrong, crashing the program and noticing it immediately that something is wrong.<p>I think language people also recognizes benefits.<p>- PHP7 allows using strict types.<p>- Python has static type support<p>- Javasript -&gt; Typescript<p>Disclaimer: Have used php, tried ruby. Using C# and javascript. Looking forward to typescript.<p>Do dynamic language people: 1. Write more tests? 2. Have more defective code? 3. Are better at writing code? 4. Maybe there is just no correlation between code correctness and static&#x2F;dynamic lang. I just wrote down MY feelings.

Thank you, Guido! I&#x27;ve learned Python and since loved Computer Science.

I owe a lot to the python language and the community. One thing specifically stands out with Guido is humility. Smart, successful and kind ... empathy for others - from the language design to focus on readability, to helping new comers - what an amazing role model! It is no surprise when you see that reflection in the python community at large.

I first learned Python back in 1996, when there was just one Python forum where Guido answered any and all questions.<p>He was gracious and polite enough not to call me a dumbass for not realizing that tabs were a requirement, not an option.<p>That was also when I became a tab-convert.<p>Thank you Guido for this incredible tool that has helped so many others actualize their solution aspirations.

Python made programming fun for me again. Thanks, Guido.

The genius of Python is that it treads that fine line between allowing too little or too much control. Between being too strict or too liberal. Between trading speed for clarity and simplicity.<p>It is the ideal programming language for an increasing set of tasks.

Usually any post about python is about how shitty the language is and how one can&#x27;t write anything larger than hello world in dynamically typed language. This one in wholesome, I like it.

Thank you Guido for all you did for this community. While others have pointed out your contributions to the Python community, I have found inspiration in how you paved a path to the engineering culture all around us. In a time when career progression was to transition into management after a certain degree of tenure, your adamant refusal to stay technical and &quot;just code&quot; has shaped my personal views and my own aspirations for my career. You will always be cherished

After coding in Delphi, Java, C and C++ - Python was the first language that I really enjoyed coding it. When you enjoy a language, it&#x27;s easy to start working on fun side projects that advance your skills and you continue improving yourself. Even though I don&#x27;t write pretty much Python anymore, I still like and respect the language and would definitely recommend it to any new comers in programming. Thanks for Python!

A more than deserved retirement. And I&#x27;m sure there will be plenty of free time coding as well.<p>Given the impact Python has had on my career I&#x27;m nothing but grateful for it.<p>Thank You

It&#x27;s been some time since I programmed in Python and it left a good impression with some caveats. I remember being bothered by the lack of a strong type checker. I see that now there is MyPy. Good to know. The other problem is the lack of a super fast runtime. A Python to C compiler would be great. I remember using Cython but didn&#x27;t like it that much, even though it was much faster then normal Python;

Thank you Guido. Because of you and your work, incumbents have been toppled, careers have shifted Or skyrocketed, and fortunes have been reaped. I hope retirement is as kind to Guido as Guido has been kind to us.<p>Also highly encourage people to read the PEPs, as well as mailing list archives and interesting bugs on bugs.python.org. The PSF highly encourages backwards compatibility so that history is all there and live :)

For those of us running ad-blockers, here is a version that is readable thanks to the Internet Archive: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20191030162322&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.dropbox.com&#x2F;topics&#x2F;company&#x2F;thank-you--guido" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20191030162322&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.drop...</a>

The article made it sounds like Dropbox is no longer pure 100% Python. What other languages do they use now?

Python literally changed my life. I was in a bad situation when I started learning it, and from that point, job offers never ended, a whole new world opened for me. Not sure if another language could have done that for me.<p>Thank You, Guido!

My whole career was based around Python -- 16+ years of it. I used many other languages but Python was the most enjoyable and useful.<p>Thanks Guido!

Congrats Guido. But don&#x27;t bulshit me about retirement - you will probably find something else to keep your mind busy :)

If he&#x27;s anything like me he won&#x27;t stay &quot;retired&quot; for long. The longest I lasted without anything coding-related to do is 9 months.

Why did this take so long to load?

Thank you, Guido!

Well deserved.

Did you notice this: &quot;He has already put into motion the conversion of the Dropbox server code from Python 2 to Python 3.&quot; Even the company that hired Guido is still heavily dependent on Python 2, and it doesn&#x27;t surprise me at all; my own employer still has a lot of it in internal tools.

This is a cool read (and a shared sentiment!), I&#x27;ve always wondered what industry luminaries do day-to-day, and hasn&#x27;t it been quite the draw for Dropbox from a recruiting perspective, to say, &quot;Oh, and Guido might want to ask you some questions about your code.&quot;<p>I wonder what &quot;retirement&quot; means for Guido. The Python&#x2F;software community could never hear from him again and he&#x27;d completely deserve the rest (and we the community would be immensely grateful for the work already poured in), but I get the sense that won&#x27;t be the case. :D

Thank!

&gt; It is so intuitive and beautifully designed<p>No it&#x27;s not. Significant whitespace, underscores that mean things, lack of type system (but people treat variables as typed anyway), et all, make it quite a difficult language to understand. And we won&#x27;t get into performance problems that it&#x27;s cult following turns a blind eye to.<p>I will say Python has inspired a generation of languages that got away from the C-inspired syntax. We&#x27;re moved to critically thinking about _why_ we write code the way we do, rather than simply accepting things because &quot;that&#x27;s the way it&#x27;s done&quot; and for that we owe Python a great debt.

While reading the article, I found myself just playing with the top bar. This is a decently common pattern that I always find distracting.

Time to Go.