Dropbox Hires Guido Van Rossum

"<i>the adventure found at a nimble 250-person startup like Dropbox becomes more tempting</i>"<p>What <i>is</i> the definition of a startup these days, anyway?

I'll be very interested to find out what role Guido will take up at dropbox. When someone like Matz/ Guido/ etc gets hired, what do their job responsibilities, for the community include exactly? Are language writer hires such as this purely symbolic?

Kind of a quirky note, but now the creators of all of the most popular web languages (Ruby, PHP and Python) have had a stint at YC companies:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2756314" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2756314</a><p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/27/php-founder-rasmus-lerdorf-joins-group-payments-startup-wepay/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/27/php-founder-rasmus-lerdorf-...</a>

It always strikes me as odd when something like this happens. Guido is still working nine-to-fives and Drew never has to work again. Can someone tell me why a brilliant person like Guido isn't worth a billion dollars? Have tons of fancy cars and a fancy house? Has to work for another company?

Would someone like this be paid based on their fame and/or positive PR value, or would they be paid based on position just like everyone else? I've always wondered if these "programming celebrities" make substantially more just based on their personal brand, or if their personal brand just affords them the opportunity to have any job they so desire (but with the "standard" pay)

I've long held the theory that Dropbox's long-term secret plan is to host apps - as they already have the data, this will effectively make them the fabled "internet OS".<p>Having Guido on board to make python its systems language makes sense - and would be enough to tempt him away from google.

Speechless. This is definitely one of the best decisions that Dropbox will probably ever make. Not only will this mean that Dropbox can hire other equally great Python developers, but as a company you can't get any more humbling than, "hey we hired the guy who wrote the programming language this site is based on and makes its money from"<p>Guido is an exceptional engineer as well, not just a guy who knows Python really well. The dude is seriously one of the rare gems in the community.

I was always impressed by how much code Guido wrote at Google, he definitely isn't afraid to get his hands dirty.

A decade ago, Python being widely used in Google and the creator of Python being employed by the company was a big endorsement for the language. Now Python is quite mainstream. Actually, Guido was allowed to devote 50% of his time at Google for Python. Hope the good work continues at Dropbox.

FWIW, Guido's role at Google wasn't specific to Python. He worked on real product teams and contributed much more than his Python expertise.<p>The article seems to think that Dropbox hired him for his thorough knowledge of Python, which probably had some role in the hiring decision, but I expect that the primary motivation was to acquire an excellent engineer.

I wonder, will Dropbox still allocate 50% of Guido's time toward Python development?<p>Further, donning our tinfoil hats, is it reasonable to suspect that Google is phasing out the use of Python internally? I've heard rumors that Python is no longer permitted for new projects within Google; hoping some Googlers here can confirm or deny this.

See also: <a href="https://tech.dropbox.com/2012/12/welcome-guido/" rel="nofollow">https://tech.dropbox.com/2012/12/welcome-guido/</a>

<p><pre><code> Python has been a backbone of Dropbox since its early days as it allowed the startup to write code once but deploy it across platforms. </code></pre> Can anybody elaborate on this? Is the argument that Python is cross-platform because everybody uses GNU tools on every platform, or are there other reasons why Python is more cross-platform than other languages?

I like Google... And Dropbox is also good. I don't know how I'm supposed to feel! HN always tells me who the villain in a story is. Someone please help!

I heard from a friend who talked with Guido this year, he couldn't let Google add Python to Android and Chrome, this make him disappointed.

I think it's been about a year since he gave his Python talk at Dropbox. I suppose they also used that opportunity to begin to recruit him.

Why Guido left? That's the question.

Dang, Dropbox is stealing talent from every direction.

This is great Dropbox PR. Also I'd imagine DB Python developers are excited!

1. Will GO replace Python?<p>2. What seems to be happening to ndb.models in near future?<p>3. Will Guido leaving Google affect webapp2 in any way?

It's more interesting that he left Google.

Guido's last commit?<p><a href="http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/source/detail?r=f66cc9030489ea92a2e699a0f1a68a854f1d064c#" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/source/detail?r=f66cc90304...</a>

Two comments:<p>IMHO, Python would have been in a far better place if Guido and his team would have been getting paid to maintain and evolve Python, the language, rather than apps and platforms based on Python. I think in the early days at Google he was able to do so, later, appengine took most of his time.<p>Dropbox is still a startup - despite the substantial investments rounds - since it is still relying on external money (investments) to grow.

It's not uncommon to see staff from Google going to another small company and then some months later, the company is acquired by Google...

Great news for Dropbox, I cannot wait to see what Guido will do for Dropbox.

interesting (to say the least). does it mean that Go is taking prominence at GOOG ?

Guido is a boss.