Guido van Rossum

read in your book about the history of math, one of the first algorithms ever written down, all you have to do is check, is it divisible by any of the previous prime numbers that are smaller than the square root?

And before you get to a better algorithm than that,

you have to have several PhDs in discrete math.

So that's as much as I know.

The simpler algorithms are also the ones that people invent first, because when you're looking for a solution, you look at the simplest way to get there first.

And so if there is a simple solution, even if it's not the best solution, not the fastest or the most memory efficient or whatever,

A simple solution, and simple is fairly subjective, but mathematicians have also thought about sort of what is a good definition for simple in the case of algorithms.

But the simpler solutions tend to be...

easier to follow for other programmers who haven't made a study of a particular field.

And when I started with Python, I was a good programmer in general.

I knew sort of basic data structures.

I knew the C language pretty well.

But there were many areas where I was only somewhat familiar with the state of the art.

And so I picked...

In many cases, the simplest way I could solve a particular sub-problem, because when you're designing and implementing a language, you have to, like, you have many hundreds of little problems to solve.

And you have to have solutions for every one of them before you can sort of say, I've invented a programming language.

The interpreter, basically, it's sort of a recipe for understanding recipes.

So instead of a recipe that says, bake me a cake, we have a recipe for, well, given...

the text of a program, how do we run that program?

And that is sort of the recipe for building a computer.