Python Creator Guido van Rossum Retires, Heads To Python Conference

"Guido van Rossum, the creator of the hugely popular Python programming language, is leaving cloud file storage firm Dropbox and heading into retirement," reports ZDNet:

That ends his six and half years with the company, which hired in him in 2013 because so much of its functionality was built on Python. And, after last year stepping down from his leadership role over Python decision making, that means the Python creator is officially retiring....

According to Dropbox, in 2011, when van Rossum first met Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, the Dropbox server and desktop client were written "almost exclusively in Python". Today, Dropbox also relies on Go, TypeScript, and Rust, as well as the open source Mypy static type checker that Dropbox develops to manage Python code at scale. Mypy helps developers overcome the challenge of understanding dynamically typed Python code written by other developers in the past...

Dropbox said van Rossum has had a major impact on its engineering culture. "There was a small number of really smart, really young coders who produced a lot of very clever code that only they could understand," said van Rossum. "That is probably the right attitude to have when you're a really small startup." However, as Dropbox notes, when the company grew, new engineers could not understand the clever but 'short and cryptic' code written by and for earlier developers. Van Rossum called this "cowboy coding culture" and educated the company about the value of maintainable code. "When asked, I would give people my opinion that maintainable code is more important than clever code," he said.... Dropbox also credits van Rossum with sharpening the company's testing processes for its continuous integration program and helping engineers understand why tests were broken.

"Thank you, Guido" is the title of the post on Dropbox's blog announcing the news that van Rossum is now retiring. Sharing that article on Twitter Thursday, van Rossum added "It's bittersweet... I've learned a lot during my time as an engineer here -- e.g. type annotations came from this experience -- and I'll miss working here."

But by Friday he was heading off to the North Bay Python conference in Petaluma, California.