Saturday, June 27, 2020

Python and its Creator

Python has a fairly recent history too, as C++. And I'm impressed to say "fairly" because it was in 1992. Time is catching up. Anyway, this is a language created to minimize the effort of the programmer to write code and to read it¹. This was a problem faced in the beggining of the 90's, and the easyness of Python to be teached to kids, and maybe good timing to rise on the community, led it to success along the years. 

Until today, we can see the initial goal of the Python's creator, Guido van Rossum, still being reached: increase productivity¹. Even though the language is maintained by another group, without Guido. One of the best examples of this, in my point of view, are the current libraries for convolutional neural networks, a.k.a, deep learning nets. I was always afraid of start studying them, for I knew they were complex. But then, I saw how it was handled by Python, the high level, and the fear was gone. That's the power I think Python has.


There is an interview with Guido I found on YouTube (yes, I spend a lot of time on YouTube, so I'll cite it in this blog very often), where Guido says at 07:54 to 08:20:

"If I had been smart, I would have done somenthing like take the Perl interpreter and port that into Amoeba. And nobody would have heard of me again. But I was like... I felt if it was going to be a hobby project anyway, I might as well do something that I thought it was really fun."   


That surprised me. It describes exactly what made me start pursuing my interest of working in the entertainment industry. And I'm starting it here.

Again, I think its great to see the contributors of computer science sharing the same time as us. Quoting another channel I like:

"What a time to be alive!"



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