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

Just like you couldn't redefine C to use indentation, even if you agreed that indentation sort of in a Greenfield environment would be better.

You can't change that kind of thing in a language.

It's hard enough to reach agreement over much more minor details.

I mean, in the past in Python, we did have a big debate about tabs versus spaces and four spaces versus fewer or more.

And we sort of came up with...

a recommended standard and sort of options for people who want to be different.

Well, it frees up a pair of matched brackets of which there are never enough in the world for other purposes.

It really makes the language slightly sort of easier to grasp for people who don't already know another programming language.

Because sort of one of the things, and I mostly got this from my mentors who taught me programming language design in the earlier 80s.

When you're teaching programming for the total newbie who has not coded before, not in any other language,

a whole bunch of concepts in programming are very alien or sort of new and maybe very interesting, but also distracting and confusing.

And there are many different things you have to learn.

You have to sort of... In a typical 13-week programming course, you have to... If it's like really...

learning to program from scratch.

You have to cover algorithms, you have to cover data structures, you have to cover syntax, you have to cover variables, loops, functions, recursion, classes, expressions, operators.

There are so many concepts.

If you can spend a little less time having to worry about the syntax,

The classic example was often, oh, the compiler complains every time I put a semicolon in the wrong place or I forget to put a semicolon.

Python doesn't have semicolons in that sense.

So you can't forget them.

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