Python designer Van Rossum (Google) at CWI

Our former CWI colleague and Python designer Guido van Rossum (Google) gave a lecture at CWI on 5 July 2007. The lecture started at 15.00h in the Turing room at the (then called) Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI) (now Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Kruislaan 413 (now Science Park 123) in Amsterdam. This text is from 2007.

Programming language Python has many users, like Google, Yahoo, Walt Disney, ABN AMRO and NASA. It has been designed in the early 1990s by Guido van Rossum, at that time scientist at the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam. Python is an interpreted object-oriented language and belongs to a group of languages with members like Java, Perl and PHP. It can be used for scripting, web services, system administration and 'rapid prototyping'. Being a fan of the series 'Monty Python's Flying Circus' Van Rossum called this language Python. Guido van Rossum left CWI in 1995. He joined Google in 2005.

Van Rossum's lecture was entitled 'Python 3000'. Abstract: "Since the renewed Python 3000 effort was announced in 2006, a lot has happened. We've implemented about half of the promised changes in a branch, we've solidified the schedule, there's a refactoring tool that can do source-to-source translations, and we've produced several gigabytes of discussion about language change proposals (most of which were deemed too radical in the end :-) . In this talk I'll discuss the Python 3000 road map, status, and what this means for the average Python user."

More information can be found on python.org, Guido van Rossum's homepage or Guido's Python 3000 Status Update