Back in college, I majored in computer science. Between 2004 and 2007, I was passionate about graphic design, and somehow I concluded that computer science must teach graphic design in a way or another. ( Hey! don't laugh at my thought process 😅)
In the first semester, we had a course named CS 152. It meant to teach us the basics of programming using C. It was overwhelming understanding the logic and dealing with the technicalities of C at the same time. So I remember, and I could be wrong, that every time you want to write a simple program that prints a "Hello World," you need to write something like this:
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("Hello, World!");
return 0;
}
At the time, I didn't understand why I should write "#include" and (int main), and it wasn't a great intro to programming for me.
Nowadays, I believe if the instructor decided to teach us an intuitive programming language like Python, I think my experience will be different.
Why do I include this long introduction?
I was browsing my twitter feed the other day and saw Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, decided to step down. After 29 years of development, he decided to be less active on the core development.
When I read the article, the following questions came to mind :
- Looking back, how does he feel spending all of this time on creating the language? Was it worth it?
- How it does it feel working on one thing for your whole life? (not sure if he has other things going on at the same time)
- How does it feel seeing the stuff you created goes unfavorable paths?
In my current mindset, I can't work on one thing for this long. However, In this history of open source, a few people come to mind who still maintain what they created like Linus Torvalds, Linux creator, Daniel Stenberg, Curl creator, and many others. I admire their dedication and commitment.
While writing this post, I stumbled upon Guido van Rossum proposal to DARBA to create computer programming for everybody, which later became Python.