Guido van Rossum

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1,189 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2022 last heard Nov 2022

Guido van Rossum’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Lex Fridman Podcast · #341 – Guido van Rossum: Python and the Future of Programming · 26 Nov 2022 podcast

What happens after 99?

Probably just 3.100 if I make it there.

It has to do with simplicity of software versus performance.

And so even though C is known to be a low-level language, which is great for writing sort of a high-performance language interpreter, when I originally started Python or CPython, I didn't expect there would be great success and fame in my future.

So I...

I tried to get something working and useful in about three months.

And so I sort of, I cut corners.

I borrowed ideas left and right when it comes to language design as well as implementation.

I also wrote much of the code as simple as it could be.

And

There are many things that you can code more efficiently by adding more code.

It's a bit of a sort of a time-space trade-off where you can compute a certain thing from a small number of inputs.

And every time you get presented with a new input, you do the whole computation from the top.

that can be simple looking code it's easy to understand it's easy to reason about that you can you can tell quickly that it's correct in at least in the sort of mathematical sense of correct uh because it's implemented in c maybe it performs relatively well but over time as sort of

As the requirements for that code and the need for performance go up, you might be able to rewrite that same algorithm using more memory, maybe remember previous results so you don't have to recompute everything from scratch.

Like the classic example is computing prime numbers.

Like, is 10 a prime number?

Well, you sort of, is it divisible by 2?

Is it divisible by 3?

Is it divisible by 4?

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