[ Thanks to BeOpen
for this link. ]
“As open source projects go, Python, the “very high level
language” developed by Guido Van Rossum 10 years ago, is a prime
example of the “scratch your own itch” design philosophy. Van
Rossum, a 44 year old developer who spent much of his collegiate
and post- collegiate years working with instructional software
languages such as ABC and Pascal, freely admits that it was his
annoyance with these languages’ real-word performance that drove
him to create Python.”
“BeOpen: From an open source perspective, how
is creating a language different from developing something like
Linux?
Guido: Actually, languages have had something
like an open source development for a very long time. Starting, I
think, in the Sixties, there have been standardization committees
involving all sorts of languages. Languages that were not developed
in an open fashion would only succeed if they were aimed at a very
narrow application domain.”
“BeOpen: That evolution away from the machine
seems like a necessary step, because you want to move in a
direction where it doesn’t matter what the hardware is. You want
your code to be completely portable. Is that a fair assumption?
Guido: Actually, at the moment, portability is
much more constrained by the software environment than by the
hardware environment. For example, Windows and Linux run on exactly
the same hardware and yet it’s easy to write programs even in
Python that run only on one of those but not on the other. …”