II · Languages & runtimes

Guido van Rossum

1956–

Microsoft · ex-Dropbox · ex-Google · creator of Python

Gave us

Python. The language is named after Monty Python, not the snake.

The story

Built Python over Christmas break in 1989. Stepped down as BDFL in 2018 after the walrus operator (PEP 572) debate burned him out. Returned to active dev at Microsoft on CPython performance.

One more thing

BDFL stood for "Benevolent Dictator For Life". The "for life" part was negotiable.

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Across the field

III Brendan Eich Brave Software · ex-Mozilla · creator of JavaScript III Daniel Stenberg wolfSSL · creator and maintainer of curl III David Karger MIT professor · co-founder Akamai IV Michael Stonebraker MIT · creator of Ingres, Postgres, Vertica, VoltDB · 2014 Turing laureate IV Jim Gray Microsoft Research · ex-Tandem · 1998 Turing laureate IV Rudolf Bayer TU München emeritus · Boeing Research IV Pat Helland AWS · ex-Microsoft · ex-Salesforce IV Martin Kleppmann University of Cambridge · author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications

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