Beyond the AI Hype: Guido van Rossum on Python’s Philosophy, Simplicity, and the Future of Programming.
” I am definitely not looking forward to an AI-driven future. I’m not worried about AI wanting to kill us all, but I see too many _people_ without ethics or morals getting enabled to do much more damage to society with less effort.”
Q1. The “Zen of Python” emphasizes simplicity and readability. As AI and machine learning systems become increasingly complex, do you believe these core principles are more important than ever, or do they need to be re-evaluated for this new era?
Guido van Rossum: Code still needs to be read and reviewed by humans, otherwise we risk losing control of our existence completely. And it looks like models are also actually happiest coding in languages like Python that have a “humanist” philosophy — since LLMs are good at handling human language structures, and programming languages are in the end intended for human use, it follows that (given some training) such languages are also great to be read and write by LLMs. And most LLMs have had great training in Python.
Q2. When you first created Python, did you ever envision it becoming the dominant language for scientific computing and artificial intelligence? What factors do you believe were most critical to its unexpected success in these fields?
Guido van Rossum: I had no idea! I was not ambitious at all (still am not). I do think that the critical factors to success were twofold. First, as a language, it’s super easy to understand, yet quite powerful. As Bruce Eckel observed, “it fits in your brain”. The second factor is that I designed it to support really good integration with OS services and third-party libraries. This made it versatile and extensible, e.g. by allowing major libraries like NumPy to be developed basically independently from Python itself.
Q3. With the recent work on making the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) optional and the general demand for performance in AI, what is your perspective on the future of parallelism and concurrency in Python? How crucial is this for the language’s longevity?
Guido van Rossum: I honestly think the importance of the GIL removal project has been overstated. It serves the needs of the largest users (e.g. Meta) while complicating things for potential contributors to the CPython code base (proving that new code does not introduce concurrency bugs is hard). And we see regularly questions from people who try to parallelize their code and get a slowdown — which makes me think that the programming model is not generally well understood. So I worry that Python’s getting too corporate, because the big corporate users can pay for new features only they need (to be clear, they don’t give us money to implement their features, but they give us developers, which comes down to the same thing).
Q4. You were a key advocate for introducing type hints into Python. How do you see static typing evolving within the language, and what role do you think it plays in building the large-scale, mission-critical AI applications we see today?
Guido van Rossum: I don’t know of any large-scale mission-critical AI applications, but I know of plenty of large-scale mission-critical non-AI applications and for those it’s essential to have type hints — otherwise no other tools can do much with your code base. I’d say the cut-off for using type hints is at about 10,000 lines of code — below that, it’s of diminishing value, since a developer can keep enough of it in their head, and traditional dynamic tests do a good-enough job. But once you reach 10,000 it’s hard to maintain code quality without type hints. I wouldn’t foist them upon beginners with the language though.
Q5. The transition from Python 2 to 3 was a significant, and at times challenging, chapter in the language’s history. What were the most important lessons from that experience that could inform future major evolutions of Python, especially as new paradigms emerge?
Guido van Rossum: I don’t know how paradigms would affect this (paradigm shifts effectively mean that past experience doesn’t help understand the new reality), but the key lesson is that for any future transitions (even 3.x to 3.x+1) we must always consider how we can support old applications without requiring them to change. Basically the approach to migration must be carefully considered, especially since most libraries have to support a range of versions (something that we didn’t sufficiently appreciate with 2-to-3, and for which we had no good solution planned).
Q6. Python’s simplicity is one of its most celebrated features. As new, powerful libraries for AI add layers of abstraction and complexity, what do you think is the best way for the community to keep the language approachable and prevent it from becoming overwhelming for beginners?
Guido van Rossum: So far the AI libraries I’ve used are not particularly powerful or complex — they just give people a way to talk to a server that can perform some magic. It’s no different than figuring out how to use some of the more complex internet protocols. Maybe the main difference is that AI providers are in such a hurry that they change their APIs every three weeks and provide horrible, chaotic documentation. 🙂 In the end we will do what we’ve always done — the world of software is built on libraries and APIs.
Python has survived many dramatic changes in computing unscathed (in the early ’90s the Internet barely existed, and e.g. Microsoft was distributing software on floppy disks and CD-ROMs — we made it through the development of the Internet and the World-Wide Web, from centralized computers to PCs to software running in the browser, and through huge scaling improvements of hardware).
Q7. Given the specific demands of modern AI development—from data manipulation to model training—if you had the power to add one major feature or change to Python’s core today, what would it be and why?
Guido van Rossum: Nothing comes to mind. AI is over-hyped. It’s still software. In my own use of AI we make good use of it with the help of some small libraries that harness the power of AI to do useful things (notably human language understanding and generation) to data that we manipulate in quite traditional ways. Some of our code is written by a so-called “agent”. But we don’t use “vibe coding” — we stay in control where it comes to architecture and API design.
Q8. Newer languages like Mojo and Julia are being developed specifically for high-performance AI. How do you view this emerging competition, and what must Python do to maintain its leadership position and stay relevant for the next decade of technological advancement?
Guido van Rossum: Mojo is intended to *implement* high-performance AI “kernels”, which is a very exacting piece of classing computer optimization. It has no chance of replacing Python’s ecosystem — that’s just not what they are interested in. I don’t recall Julia being used for high-performance AI — it’s used for high-performance numerical computation, which can serve AI just as well as it can serve other demanding application domains.
Q9. Your role has evolved from Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL) to a distinguished engineer at Microsoft. How has this transition influenced your perspective on Python’s development, its community governance, and its place within the larger corporate tech ecosystem?
Guido van Rossum: It’s clearly a demotion. 🙂 I was BDFL until it was no longer possible for a single person to take on all the responsibilities of Python governance. I retired from my day job. I ended up at Microsoft because I realized I wasn’t ready to stop coding, and after Google and Dropbox (and with the ghost of Ballmer thoroughly expurgated) it seemed a good place to try and have some more fun coding.
Q10. Looking back at your incredible journey with Python and looking forward to an AI-driven future, what do you hope the ultimate legacy of Python will be? And on a personal level, how do you envision the craft of programming itself changing in the coming years?
Guido van Rossum: I am definitely not looking forward to an AI-driven future. I’m not worried about AI wanting to kill us all, but I see too many _people_ without ethics or morals getting enabled to do much more damage to society with less effort. The roots for that abuse have been laid by social media, though — another major computer paradigm shift that changed society but didn’t really affect the nature of software.
I hope that Python’s legacy will reflect its spirit of grassroots and worldwide collaboration based on equity and respect rather than power and money, and of enabling “the little guy” to code up dream projects.
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Guido van Rossum is the creator of the Python programming language.
He grew up in the Netherlands and studied at the University of Amsterdam, where he graduated with a Master’s Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science.
His first job after college was as a programmer at CWI, where he worked on the ABC language, the Amoeba distributed operating system, and a variety of multimedia projects. During this time he created Python as side project. He then moved to the United States to take a job at a non-profit research lab in Virginia, married a Texan, worked for several other startups, and moved to California.
In 2005 he joined Google, where he obtained the rank of Senior Staff Engineer, and in 2013 he started working for Dropbox as a Principal Engineer.
In October 2019 he retired. After a short retirement he joined Microsoft as Distinguished Engineer in 2020. Until 2018 he was Python’s BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life), and he is still deeply involved in the Python community.
Guido and his family live in Silicon Valley, where they love hiking, biking and birding.
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