Guido van Rossum

It's like a great assistant.

But the creative work of sort of deciding what you want the code to do is totally yours.

It'll eventually become sort of a legacy language that plays an important role, but that most people have never heard of and don't need to know about, just like all kinds of basic structures in biology, like mitochondria.

Yeah.

Because you build layers of abstractions.

I mean, most programmers nowadays rarely need to do binary arithmetic, right?

I started...

building little digital circuits out of NAND gates that I built myself with transistors and resistors.

So I sort of, I feel very blessed that with that start when I was a teenager, I learned some of the basic, at least concepts that go into building a computer.

And I sort of, every part...

I have some understanding what it's for and why it's there and how it works.

And I can forget about all that most of the time, but I sort of, I enjoy knowing, oh, if you go deeper, at some point you get to NAND gates and half adders and shift registers and

When it comes to the point of how do you actually make a chip out of silicon, I have no idea.

That's just magic to me.

The other day, as a sort of mental exercise, I was trying to figure out if I could build a flip-flop circuit out of relays.

I was just sort of trying to remember, oh, how does a relay work?

Yeah, there's like this electromagnetic force that pulls a switch open or shut.

And you can have like, it can open one switch and shut another and whatever.

You can have multiple contacts that go at once.

And how many relays do I really need to sort of represent one bit of information?