The following is a conversation with Guido Van Rossum, creator of Python,
one of the most popular programming languages in the world, used in almost any application
that involves computers, from web backend development to psychology, neuroscience,
computer vision, robotics, deep learning, natural language processing, and almost any
subfield of AI. This conversation is part of MIT course on artificial general intelligence
and the artificial intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes,
or your podcast provider of choice, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman,
spelled F-R-I-D. And now, here's my conversation with Guido Van Rossum.
You were born in the Netherlands in 1956. Your parents and the world around you was deeply
impacted by World War II, as was my family from the Soviet Union. So with that context,
what is your view of human nature? Are some humans inherently good and some inherently
evil, or do we all have both good and evil within us?
Ouch. I did not expect such a deep one. I guess we all have good and evil potential in us,
and a lot of it depends on circumstances and context.
Out of that world, at least on the Soviet Union side in Europe, out of suffering,
out of challenge, out of that kind of set of traumatic events, often emerges beautiful art,
music, literature. In an interview I read or heard, you said you enjoyed Dutch literature
when you were a child. Can you tell me about the books that had an influence on you in your
childhood? Well, as a teenager, my favorite writer was, my favorite Dutch author was
a guy named Willem Friedrich Hermans, whose writing, certainly his early novels, were all about
sort of ambiguous things that happened during World War II. I think he was a young adult during
that time, and he wrote about it a lot and very interesting, very good books, I thought, I think.
In a nonfiction way? No, it was all fiction, but it was very much set in the ambiguous world of
resistance against the Germans, where often you couldn't tell whether someone was truly
in the resistance or really a spy for the Germans, and some of the characters in his novels
sort of crossed that line, and you never really find out what exactly happened.
And in his novels, there's always a good guy and a bad guy. Is the nature of good and evil,
is it clear there's a hero? It's no, his heroes are often more, his main characters are often
anti-heroes, and so they're not very heroic. They're often, they fail at some level to
accomplish their lofty goals. And looking at the trajectory through the rest of your life,
has literature, Dutch, or English, or translation, and an impact outside the technical world that
you existed in? I still read novels. I don't think that it impacts me that much directly.
It doesn't impact your work. It's just, it's a... It's a separate world. My work is highly technical
and sort of the world of art and literature doesn't really directly have any bearing on it.
You don't think there's a creative element to the design? You know, some would say
art, design of a language is art.
I'm not disagreeing with that. I'm just saying that sort of, I don't feel direct influences
from more traditional art on my own creativity.
All right, of course, you don't feel, doesn't mean it's not somehow deeply there in your subconscious.
Who knows? Who knows? So let's go back to your early teens. Your hobbies
were building electronic circuits, building mechanical models.
What, if you can just put yourself back in the mind of that young Guido, 12, 13, 14,
was that grounded in a desire to create a system, so to create something? Or was it more just
tinkering, just the joy of puzzle solving? I think it was more the latter, actually. I, maybe towards
the end of my high school period, I felt confident enough that I designed my own circuits that were
sort of interesting somewhat. But a lot of that time, I literally just took a model kit and
follow the instructions, putting the things together. I mean, that I think the first few
years that I built electronics kits, I really did not have enough understanding of sort of
electronics to really understand what I was doing. I mean, I could debug it and I could
sort of follow the instructions very carefully, which has always stayed with me. But
I had a very naive model of how a transistor works. And I don't think that in those days,
I had any understanding of coils and capacitors, which actually sort of
was a major problem when I started to build more complex digital circuits, because I was
unaware of the sort of the analog part of the how they actually work. And I would have things that
the schematic looked, everything looked fine. And it didn't work. And what I didn't realize
was that there was some megahertz level oscillation that was throwing the circuit off because I had
sort of two wires were too close or the switches were kind of poorly built.
But through that time, I think it's really interesting and instructive to think about,
because there's echoes of it are in this time now. So in the 1970s, the personal computer was being
born. So did you sense in tinkering with these circuits, did you sense the encroaching revolution
in personal computing? So if at that point, you're such will sit you down and ask you to predict the
80s and the 90s, do you think you would be able to do so successfully to unroll this the process
that's no, I had no clue. I, I remember, I think in the summer after my senior year,
or maybe it was the summer after my junior year, well, at some point, I think when I was 18, I
went on a trip to the math Olympiad in Eastern Europe. And there was like, I was part of the
Dutch team. And there were other nerdy kids that sort of had different experiences. And one of
them told me about this amazing thing called a computer. And I had never heard that word.
My own explorations in electronics were sort of about very simple digital circuits.
And I, I had sort of, I had the idea that I somewhat understood how a digital calculator worked.
And so there is maybe some echoes of computers there, but I didn't didn't, I never made that
connection. I didn't know that when my parents were paying for magazine subscriptions using
using punched cards, that there was something called a computer that was involved that read
those cards and transferred the money between accounts. I was actually also not really interested
in those things. It was only when I went to university to study math that I found out
that they had a computer and students were allowed to use it.
And there were some, you're supposed to talk to that computer by programming it.
Yeah. What did that feel like? Yeah, that was the only thing you could do with it.
The computer wasn't really connected to the real world. The only thing you could do was
sort of, you typed your program on a bunch of punched cards. You gave the punched cards to
the operator. And an hour later, the operator gave you back your printout. And so all you could do
was write a program that did something very abstract. And I don't even remember what my
first forays into programming were, but they were sort of doing simple math exercises and
just to learn how a programming language worked.
Did you sense, okay, first year of college, you see this computer, you're able to have
a program and it generates some output. Did you start seeing the possibility of this?
Or was it a continuation of the tinkering with circuits? Did you start to imagine that,
one, the personal computer, but did you see it as something that, as a tool,
like a tool, like a word processing tool, maybe for gaming or something?
Or did you start to imagine that it could be going to the world of robotics?
Like, you know, the Frankenstein picture that you could create an artificial being,
there's like another entity in front of you. You did not see it.
I don't think I really saw it that way. I was really more interested in the tinkering. It's
maybe not a sort of a complete coincidence that I ended up sort of creating a programming language,
which is a tool for other programmers. I've always been very focused on the sort of activity
of programming itself and not so much what happens with the program you write. I do remember,
and I don't remember, maybe in my second or third year, probably my second, actually,
probably, someone pointed out to me that there was this thing called Conway's Game of Life.
You're probably familiar with it. I think in the 70s, I think, as long as you came up with it.
So there was a Scientific American column by someone who did a monthly column about
mathematical diversions and also blinking out on the guy's name. It was very famous at the time,
and I think up to the 90s or so. And one of his columns was about Conway's Game of Life,
and he had some illustrations, and he wrote down all the rules. And sort of there was the suggestion
that this was philosophically interesting, that that was why Conway had called it that.
And all I had was like the two pages photocopy of that article. I didn't even remember where I got it.
But it spoke to me, and I remember implementing a version of that game
for the batch computer we were using, where I had a whole Pascal program that sort of read
an initial situation from input and read some numbers that said, do so many generations and
print every so many generations. And then out would come pages and pages of sort of
things. Patterns of different kinds. Yeah. And I remember much later, I've done a similar thing
using Python, but that original version I wrote at the time, I found interesting because I combined
it with some trick I had learned during my electronics hobbyist times. I essentially first
on paper, I designed a simple circuit built out of logic gates that took nine bits of input,
which is the sort of the cell and its neighbors, and produce the new value for that cell.
And it's like a combination of a half adder and some other clipping. No, it's actually a full adder.
And so I had worked that out. And then I translated that into a series of
Boolean operations on Pascal integers, where you could use the integers as bitwise values.
And so I could basically generate 60 bits of a generation in like eight instructions or so.
Nice. So I was proud of that.
It's funny that you mentioned, so for people who don't know Conway's game of life is there's
it's a cellular automata where there's single compute units that kind of look at their neighbors.
And figure out what they look like in the next generation based on the state of their neighbors.
And this is deeply distributed system in concept, at least. And then there's simple rules that all
of them follow. And somehow out of this simple rule, when you step back and look at what occurs,
it's beautiful. There's an emergent complexity, even though the underlying rules are simple,
there's an emergent complexity. Now, the funny thing is you've implemented this and the thing
you're commenting on is you're proud of a hack you did to make it run efficiently.
When you're not commenting on what like this is a beautiful implementation.
You're not commenting on the fact that there's an emergent complexity
that you've you've you've coded a simple program. And when you step back and you print
out the following generation after generation, that's stuff that you may have not predicted
what happened is happening. Right. And is that magic? I mean, that's the magic that all of us
feel when we program when you create a program, and then you run it. And whether it's Hello World
or show something on screen if there's a graphical component, are you seeing the magic in the
mechanism of creating that? I think I went back and forth. As a student, we had an incredibly
small budget of computer time that we could use. It was actually measured. I once got in trouble
with one of my professors because I had overspent the department's budget. It's a different story,
but so I I actually wanted the efficient implementation because I also wanted to explore
what would happen with a larger number of generations and a larger sort of size of the
of the board. And so once the implementation was flawless, I would feed a different patterns and
then I think maybe there was a follow up article where there were patterns that that were like
gliders, patterns that repeated themselves after a number of generations, but translated one or
two positions to the right or up or something like that. And there were I remember things like
glider guns while you can you can Google Conway's Game of Life. It's still people still go on over
it. For a reason because it's not really well understood. Why? I mean, this is what Stephen
Wolfram is obsessed about. Okay, he's just the we don't have the mathematical tools to describe the
kind of complexity that emerges in these kinds of systems. And the only way you can do is to run it.
I'm not convinced that that it's sort of a problem that lends itself to to classic
mathematical analysis. No. And so one theory of how you create an artificial intelligence or an
artificial being is you kind of have to, same with the game of life, you kind of have to create a
universe and let it run that creating it from scratch in a design way in the, you know,
coding up a Python program that creates a full intelligence system may be quite challenging
that you might need to create a universe just like the game of life is.
Well, you might have to experiment with a lot of different universes before
there there is a set of rules that doesn't essentially always just end up repeating itself in a
trivial way. Yeah. And Steve Wolfram, Stephen Wolfram works with these simple rules, says that
it's kind of surprising how quickly you find rules that create interesting things. You shouldn't be
able to, but somehow you do. And so maybe our universe is laden with, with rules that will
create interesting things that might not look like humans, but, you know, emergent phenomena
that's interesting may not be as difficult to create as we think. Sure. But let me sort of ask,
at that time, you know, some of the world, at least in popular press,
uh, was kind of captivated, perhaps at least in America, by the idea of artificial intelligence
that, that these computers would be able to think pretty soon. And did that touch you at all? Did
that in science fiction or in reality in, in any way? I didn't really start reading science fiction
until much, much later. I think as a teenager, I, I read maybe one bundle of science fiction stories.
Was it in the background somewhere, like in your thoughts?
That sort of the using computers to build something intelligent always felt to me because I had,
I felt I had so much understanding of what actually goes on inside a computer. I,
I knew how many bits of memory it had and how difficult it was to program and sort of,
I didn't believe at all that, that you could just build something intelligent out of that,
that, that would really sort of satisfy my definition of intelligence. I think the most,
the most influential thing that I read in my early 20s was Gödel Escherbach. That was about
consciousness and that was a big eye-opener in, in some sense.
In, in what sense? So, so con, so yeah, so on your own brain, did you use, did you at the time or do
you now see your own brain as a computer or is there a total separation of the way? So yeah,
you're very pragmatically, practically know the limits of memory, the limits of this sequential
computing or weekly paralyzed computing. And you just know what we have now and it's hard to see
how it creates, but it's also easy to see. It was in the, in the 40s, 50s, 60s and now
at least similarities between the brain and our computers. Oh yeah. I mean, I,
I totally believe that brains are computers in some sense. I mean, the rules they, they used to
play by are pretty different from the rules we, we can sort of implement in, in our current hardware.
But I don't believe in like a separate thing that infuses us with intelligence or
consciousness or any of that. There's no soul. I've, I've been an atheist probably
from when I was 10 years old, just by thinking a bit about math and the universe and well,
my parents were atheists. Now, I know that you, you, you could be an atheist and still believe
that there is something sort of about intelligence or consciousness that cannot possibly emerge
from a fixed set of rules. I am not in that camp. I, I totally see that sort of given how many
millions of years evolution took its time. DNA is, is a particular machine that, that sort of
encodes information and an unlimited amount of information in, in chemical form and has figured
out a way to replicate itself. I thought that that was maybe it's 300 million years ago,
but I thought it was closer to half a, half a billion years ago that that sort of originated
and it hasn't really changed that the sort of the structure of DNA hasn't changed ever since. That is
like our binary code that we have in hardware. I mean, the basic programming language hasn't
changed, but maybe the programming itself obviously did change, did sort of, it, it happened to be
a set of rules that was good enough to, to sort of develop endless variability and, and sort of
the, the idea of self replicating molecules, competing with each other for resources and,
and one type eventually sort of always taking over that happened before there were any fossils.
So we don't know how that exactly happened, but I believe it, it's, it's clear that that did happen.
And can you comment on consciousness and how you see it? Because I think we'll talk about
programming quite a bit. We'll talk about, you know, intelligence connecting to programming
fundamentally, but consciousness, consciousness is this whole other thing. Do you think about it
often as a developer of a programming language and as a human? Those, those are pretty sort of
separate topics. Sort of my line of work, working with programming does not involve anything that,
that goes in the direction of developing intelligence or consciousness, but sort of privately
as an avid reader of popular science writing. I have some thoughts, which, which is mostly that
I don't actually believe that consciousness is an all or nothing thing. I have a feeling that, and,
and I forget what I read that influenced this, but I feel that if you look at a cat or a dog
or a mouse, they have some form of intelligence. If you look at a fish, it has some form of
intelligence and that evolution just took a long time, but I feel that the, the sort of evolution
of more and more intelligence that led to sort of the human form of intelligence
followed the evolution of the senses, especially the visual sense. I mean, there is an enormous
amount of processing that's needed to interpret a scene and humans are still better at that than,
than computers are. Yeah. And so, and, and, and I have a feeling that there is a sort of
the reason that, that like mammals is in particular developed
the levels of consciousness that they have and that eventually sort of going from intelligence
to self-awareness and consciousness has to do with sort of being a robot that has very
highly developed senses. Has a lot of rich sensory information coming in. So the,
that's a really interesting thought that the, that whatever that basic mechanism of DNA,
whatever that basic building blocks of programming is you, if you just add more abilities, more,
more high resolution sensors, more sensors, you just keep stacking those things on top that
this basic programming in trying to survive develops very interesting things that start to us humans
to appear like intelligence and consciousness. Yeah. So in, in, as far as robots go, I think
that the self-driving cars have that sort of the greatest opportunity of developing something like
that because when I drive myself, I don't just pay attention to the rules of the road.
I also look around and I get clues from that. Oh, this is a shopping district.
Oh, here's an old lady crossing the street. Oh, here is someone carrying a pile of mail.
There's a mailbox. I bet you they're going to cross the street to reach that mailbox.
And I slow down and I don't even think about that. And, and so there is, there is so much
where you turn your observations into an understanding of what other
consciousnesses are going to do or what, what other systems in the world are going to be. Oh,
that tree is going to fall. Yeah, I see sort of, I see much more of, I expect somehow that
if anything is going to become conscious, it's going to be the self-driving car and not the
network of a bazillion computers at in a Google or Amazon data center that are all networked together
to do whatever they do. So in that sense, so you actually highlight, because that's what I work in
is an autonomous vehicles, you highlight the big gap between what we currently can't do and
what we truly need to be able to do to solve the problem. Under that formulation, then consciousness
and intelligence is something that basically a system should have in order to interact with us
humans as opposed to some kind of abstract notion of a consciousness. Consciousness is
something that you need to have to be able to empathize, to be able to fear the understand
what the fear of death is. All these aspects that are important for interacting with pedestrians
need to be able to do basic computation based on our human desires and if you sort of, yeah,
if you if you look at the dog, the dog clearly knows, I mean, I'm not a dog owner, but I have
friends who have dogs, the dogs clearly know what the humans around them are going to do, or at
least they have a model of what those humans are going to do and they learn the dog, some dogs know
when you're going out and they want to go out with you, they're sad when you leave them alone,
they cry, they're afraid because they were mistreated when they were younger.
We don't assign sort of consciousness to dogs, or at least not all that much, but I also don't
think they have none of that. So I think it's consciousness and intelligence are not all or
nothing. The spectrum is really interesting, but in returning to programming languages and the way
we think about building these kinds of things, about building intelligence, building consciousness,
building artificial beings. So I think one of the exciting ideas came in the 17th century
and with Leibniz, Hobbes, Descartes, where there's this feeling that you can convert
all thought, all reasoning, all the thing that we find very special in our brains, you can convert
all of that into logic. You can formalize it, formal reasoning, and then once you formalize
everything, all of knowledge, then you can just calculate and that's what we're doing with our
brains as we're calculating. So there's this whole idea that this is possible. But they weren't
aware of the concept of pattern matching in the sense that we are aware of it now.
They had discovered incredible bits of mathematics like Newton's calculus and their sort of idealism,
their sort of extension of what they could do with logic and math sort of went along those lines.
And they thought there's like, yeah, logic, there's like a bunch of rules and a bunch of input,
they didn't realize that how you recognize a face is not just a bunch of rules, but is a
shit ton of data plus a circuit that sort of interprets the visual clues and the context
and everything else and somehow can massively parallel pattern match against stored rules.
If I see you tomorrow here in front of the Dropbox office, I might recognize you.
Even if I'm wearing a different shirt. Yeah. But if I see you tomorrow in a coffee shop in
Belmont, I might have no idea that it was you or on the beach or whatever. I make those kind of
mistakes myself all the time. I see someone that I only know as like, oh, this person is a colleague
of my wife's. And then I see them at the movies and I don't recognize them. But do you see those,
you call it pattern matching. Do you see that rules is unable to encode that to you,
everything you see, all the pieces of information you look around this room, I'm wearing a black
shirt, I have a certain height, I'm a human, all these, you can, there's probably tens of thousands
of facts you pick up moment by moment about this scene, you take them for granted and you accumulate,
aggregate them together to understand the scene. You don't think all of that could be encoded to
where at the end of the day, you just put it on the table and calculate. Oh, I don't know what that
means. I mean, yes, in the sense that there is no, there is no actual magic there. But there are
enough layers of abstraction from sort of from the facts as they enter my eyes and my ears,
to the understanding of the scene that I don't think that that AI has really covered enough
of that distance. It's like if you take a human body and you realize it's built out of atoms.
Well, that that is a uselessly reductionist view, right? The body is built out of organs,
the organs are built out of cells, the cells are built out of proteins, the proteins are
built out of amino acids, the amino acids are built out of atoms, and then you get to quantum
mechanics. So that's a very pragmatic view. I mean, obviously as an engineer, I agree with
that kind of view, but I also, you also have to consider the, the, or the Sam Harris view of,
well, well, intelligence is just information processing. You just, like you said, you take
in sensory information, you do some stuff with it, and you come up with actions that are intelligent.
That makes, he makes it sound so easy. I don't know who Sam Harris is.
Oh, it's philosopher. So like this is how philosophers often think, right? And essentially,
that's what Descartes was is, wait a minute, if there is, like you said, no magic.
So you basically says it doesn't appear like there's any magic, but we know so little about it
that it might as well be magic. So just because we know that we're made of atoms,
just because we know we're made of organs, the fact that we know very little hot to get from
the atoms to organs in a way that's recreatible means it, that you shouldn't get too excited just
yet about the fact that you figured out that we're made of atoms. Right. And, and, and the same about
taking facts as our, our sensory organs take them in and turning that into reasons and actions
that sort of, there are a lot of abstractions that we haven't quite figured out how to, how to deal
with those. I mean, I sometimes I don't know if I can go on a tangent or not. Please drag you back
in. Sure. So if I take a simple program that parses, say, say I have a compiler, it parses a
program in a sense, the input routine of that compiler of that parser is a sense, a sensing organ,
and it builds up a mighty complicated internal representation of the program. It just saw it
doesn't just have a linear sequence of bytes representing the text of the program anymore.
It has an abstract syntax tree. And I don't know how many of your viewers or listeners
are familiar with compiler technology, but there's fewer and fewer these days, right?
That's also true, probably. People want to take a shortcut, but there's sort of
this abstraction is a data structure that the compiler then uses to produce outputs that is
relevant like a translation of that program to machine code that can be executed by by hardware.
And then the data structure gets thrown away. When a fish or a fly sees
sort of gets visual impulses. I'm sure it also builds up some
data structure and for the fly that may be very minimal, a fly may may have only a few, I mean,
in the case of a fly's brain, I could imagine that there are
few enough layers of abstraction that it's not much more than when it's darker here than it is here.
Well, I can sense motion because a fly sort of responds when you move your arm towards it. So
clearly, its visual processing is intelligent. Well, not intelligent, but it has an abstraction
for motion. And we still have similar things in in but much more complicated in our brains. I mean,
otherwise you couldn't drive a car if you couldn't sort if you didn't have an incredibly good
abstraction for motion. Yeah, in some sense, the same abstraction for motion is probably one of
the primary sources of our of information for us, we just know what to do. I think we know what to
do with that. We've built up other abstractions on top. We build much more complicated data structures
based on that. And we build more persistent data structures, sort of after some processing,
some information sort of gets stored in our memory pretty much permanently and is available on recall.
I mean, there are some things that you sort of, you're conscious that you're remembering it, like
you give me your phone number. I well, at my age, I have to write it down, but I could imagine I
could remember those seven numbers or 10, 10 digits, and reproduce them in a while if I
sort of repeat them to myself a few times. So that's a fairly conscious form of memorization.
On the other hand, how do I recognize your face? I have no idea. My brain has a whole bunch of
specialized hardware that knows how to recognize faces. I don't know how much of that is sort of
coded in our DNA and how much of that is trained over and over between the ages of zero and three.
But somehow, our brains know how to do lots of things like that, that are useful in our
interactions with other humans without really being conscious of how it's done anymore.
Right. So our actual day-to-day lives, we're operating at the very highest level of abstraction.
We're just not even conscious of all the little details underlying it. There's compilers on top
of, it's like turtles on top of turtles or turtles all the way down. It's compilers all the way down.
But that's essentially, you say that there's no magic. That's what I, what I was trying to get at,
I think, is with Descartes started this whole train of saying that there's no magic.
I mean, there's others beforehand. Well, didn't Descartes also have the notion though that the
soul and the body were fundamentally separate? Yeah, I think he had to write in God in there
for political reasons. So I don't actually, I'm not a historian, but there's notions in there
that all of reasoning, all of human thought can be formalized. I think that continued in the 20th
century with Russell and with Gato's incompleteness theorem, this debate of what are the limits of
the things that could be formalized. That's where the Turing machine came along. And this
exciting idea, I mean, underlying a lot of computing, that you can do quite a lot with a
computer. You can, you can encode a lot of the stuff we're talking about in terms of recognizing
faces and so on, theoretically, in an algorithm that can then run on the computer. And in that
context, I'd like to ask programming in a philosophical way. So what, so what does it mean to program a
computer? So you said you write a Python program or compiled a C++ program that compiles to some
byte code. It's forming layers. You're programming a layer of abstraction that's higher. How do you
see programming in that context? Can it keep getting higher and higher levels of abstraction?
I think at some point, the higher levels of abstraction will not be called programming
and they will not resemble what we call programming at the moment. There will not be source code.
I mean, there will still be source code sort of at a lower level of the machine, just like
there's still molecules and electrons and sort of proteins in our brains. But and so there's still
programming and system administration and who knows what keeping to keep the machine running.
But what the machine does is is a different level of abstraction in a sense. And as far as I understand
the way that for last decade or more people have made progress with things like facial recognition
or the self driving cars is all by endless, endless amounts of training data where
at least as a layperson and I feel myself totally as a layperson in that field, it looks like
the researchers who publish the results don't necessarily know exactly how their algorithms
work. And I often get upset when I sort of read a sort of a fluff piece about Facebook
in the newspaper or social networks and they say, well, algorithms. And that's like a totally
different interpretation of the word algorithm. Because for me, the way I was trained or what
I learned when I was eight or 10 years old, an algorithm is a set of rules that you completely
understand that can be mathematically analyzed. And you can prove things, you can like prove that
Aristotelny's sieve produces all prime numbers and only prime numbers.
Yeah, so I don't know if you know who Andre Capati is.
I'm afraid not. So he's a head of AI at Tesla now, but he was at Stanford before. And he has
this cheeky way of calling this concept software 2.0. So let me disentangle that for a second.
So kind of what you're referring to is the traditional, traditional, the algorithm,
the concept of an algorithm, something that's there, it's clear, you can read it,
you understand it, you can prove it's functioning as kind of software 1.0. And what software 2.0 is
is exactly what you describe, which is you have neural networks, which is a type of machine learning
that you feed a bunch of data, and that neural network learns to do a function.
All you specify is the inputs and the outputs you want. And you can't look inside. You can't
analyze it. All you can do is train this function to map the inputs, the outputs by giving a lot
of data. In that sense, programming becomes getting a lot of cleaning, getting a lot of data. That's
what programming is in this. Well, that would be programming 2.0, 2.0, 2.0, 2.0. And I wouldn't
call that programming. It's just a different activity, just like building organs out of cells
is not called chemistry. Well, so let's just step back and think sort of more generally. Of course,
but you know, it's like, as a parent teaching your kids, things can be called programming.
In that same sense, that's how programming is being used. You're providing them data, examples,
use cases. So imagine writing a function not by not with for loops, and clearly readable text,
but more saying, well, here's a lot of examples of what this function should take. And here's a
lot of examples of when it takes those functions, it should do this, and then figure out the rest.
So that's the 2.0 concept. And so the question I have for you is like, it's a very fuzzy way.
This is the reality of a lot of these pattern recognition systems and so on. It's a fuzzy way
of quote unquote programming. What do you think about this kind of world? Should it be called
something totally different than programming? If you're a software engineer, does that mean you're
you're designing systems that are very can be systematically tested, evaluated, they have a
very specific specification. And then this other fuzzy software 2.0 world machine learning world,
that's that's something else totally? Or is there some intermixing that's possible?
Well, the question is probably only being asked because we we don't quite know what that
software 2.0 actually is. And it sort of I think there is a truism that every task that
AI has has tackled in the past. At some point, we realized how it was done. And then it was no
longer considered part of artificial intelligence, because it was no longer necessary to, to use
that term. It was just, oh, now we know how to do this. And a new field of science or engineering
has been developed. And I don't know if sort of every form of learning, or sort of controlling
computer systems should always be called programming. So I don't know, maybe I'm focused too much on
the terminology, but I expect that that there just will be different concepts where people with sort
of different education and a different model of what they're trying to do will will develop those
concepts. Yeah. And I guess if you could comment on another way to put this concept is, I think,
I think the kind of functions that neural networks provide is things as opposed to being able to
upfront prove that this should work for all cases you throw at it. All you're able, it's the worst
case analysis versus average case analysis. All you're able to say is, it seems on everything
we've tested to work 99.9% of the time, but we can't guarantee it and it fails in unexpected
ways. We can't even give you examples of how it fails in unexpected ways. But it's like really good
most of the time. Yeah, but there's no room for that in current ways we think about programming.
Programming 1.0 is actually sort of
getting to that point to where the sort of the ideal of a bug free program
has been abandoned long ago by most software developers. We only care about
bugs that manifest themselves often enough to be annoying. And we're willing to take the occasional
crash or outage or incorrect result for granted, because we can't possibly we don't have enough
programmers to make all the code bug free and it would be an incredibly tedious business. And if
you try to throw formal methods at it, it gets it becomes even more tedious. So
every once in a while, the user clicks on a link in and somehow they get an error. And the average
user doesn't panic, they just click again and see if it works better the second time, which often
magically it does. Or they go up and they try some other way of performing their tasks. So
that's sort of an end to end recovery mechanism. And inside systems, there is all sorts of retries
and timeouts and fallbacks. And I imagine that that sort of biological systems are even more full
of that because otherwise they wouldn't survive. Do you think programming should be taught and
thought of as exactly what you just said before I come from is kind of you're always denying that
you're you're always denying that fact always in in sort of basic programming education. The sort of
the programs you're you're having students write are so small and simple that if there is a bug,
you can always find it and fix it. Because the sort of programming as it's being taught in some
even elementary middle schools in high school, introduction to programming classes in college
typically, it's programming in the small, very few classes sort of actually teach software
engineering building large systems. I mean, every summer here at Dropbox, we have a large number
of interns, every tech company on the West Coast has the same thing. These interns are always
amazed because this is the first time in their life that they see what goes on in a really
large software development environment. And everything they've learned in college was almost
always about a much smaller scale and somehow that difference in scale makes a qualitative
difference in how you how you do things and how you think about it. If you then take a few steps
back into decades, 70s and 80s, when you're first thinking about Python, or just that world of
programming languages, did you ever think that there would be systems as large as underlying
Google, Facebook and Dropbox? Did you when you were thinking about Python? I was actually always
caught by surprise by this. Yeah, pretty much every stage of computing. So maybe just because
you spoke in other interviews, but I think the evolution of programming languages are
fascinating. It's especially because it leads from my perspective towards greater and greater
degrees of intelligence. I learned the first programming language I played with in Russia was
with the turtle logo, logo. Yeah. And if you look, I just have a list of programming languages,
all of which I've played with a little bit. And they're all beautiful in different ways from
Fortran, Cobile, Lisp, Algal 60, basic logo again, C, as a few, the object oriented came along in
the 60s, Simula, Pascal, small talk, all of that leads all the classics, the classics. Yeah,
the classic hits, right? Scheme built, that's built on top of Lisp, on the database side, SQL,
C plus plus, and all that leads up to Python, Pascal too. And that's before Python, Matlab,
these kind of different communities, different languages. So can you talk about that world?
I know that sort of Python came out of ABC, which actually never knew that language. I just,
having researched this conversation went back to ABC and it looks remarkably,
it has a lot of annoying qualities. But underneath those like all caps and so on.
But underneath that, there's elements of Python that are quite, they're already there.
That's where I got all the good stuff, all the good stuff. So but in that world,
you're swimming in these programming languages, were you focused on just the good stuff in your
specific circle? Or did you have a sense of what, what is everyone chasing? You said that every
programming language is built to scratch an itch. Were you aware of all the itches in the community?
And if not, or if yes, I mean, what itch were you trying to scratch with Python?
Well, I'm glad I wasn't aware of all the itches, because I would probably not have been able to
do anything. I mean, if you're trying to solve every problem at once.
You saw nothing.
Uh, well, yeah, it's, it's too overwhelming. And so I had a very, very focused problem.
I wanted a programming language that's set somewhere in between shell scripting and C.
And now, arguably, there is like, one is higher level, one is lower level.
And Python is sort of a language of an intermediate level, although it's still
pretty much at the high level. And I was, I was thinking about much more about
I want a tool that I can use to be more productive as a programmer in a very specific environment.
And I also had given myself a time budget for the development of the tool.
And that was sort of about three months for both the design, like thinking through what
are all the features of the language syntactically, and semantically, and how do I implement
the whole pipeline from parsing the source code to executing it.
So I think both with the timeline and the goals, it seems like productivity was
at the core of it as a goal. So like for me, in the 90s and the first decade of the 21st
century, I was always doing machine learning AI. Programming for my research was always in C++.
And then, and then the other people who are a little more mechanical engineering,
electrical engineering are, are Matlabby. They're a little bit more Matlab focused.
Those are the world and maybe a little bit Java too, but people who are more interested in
emphasizing the object oriented nature of things. So within the last 10 years or so,
especially with the oncoming of neural networks and these packages that are built on Python
to interface with with the neural networks, I switched to Python and it's just,
I've noticed a significant boost that I can't exactly because I don't think about it, but I
can't exactly put into words why I'm just much, much more productive. Just being able to get the
job done much, much faster. So how do you think whatever that qualitative difference is? I don't
know if it's quantitative. It could be just a feeling. I don't know if I'm actually more productive,
but how do you think about? Yeah, well, that's right. I think there's elements. Let me just speak
to one aspect that I think that was affecting our productivity is C++ was, I really enjoyed creating
performant code and creating a beautiful structure where everything that, you know, this kind of
going into this, especially with the newer and newer standards of templated programming of just
really creating this beautiful, formal structure that I found myself spending most of my time doing
that as opposed to getting it parsing a file and extracting a few keywords or whatever the task
goes trying to do. So what is it about Python? How do you think of productivity in general as
you were designing it now? So through the decades, last three decades, what do you think it means to
be a productive programmer? And how did you try to design it into the language? There are different
tasks. And as a programmer, it's useful to have different tools available that sort of are suitable
for different tasks. So I still write C code. I still write shell code. But I write most of my
things in Python. Why do I still use those other languages? Because sometimes the task just demands
it. And well, I would say most of the time, the task actually demands a certain language,
because the task is not write a program that solves problem x from scratch, but it's more like
fix a bug in existing program x or add a small feature to an existing large program.
But even if you're not constrained in your choice of language by context like that,
there is still the fact that if you write it in a certain language, then you have this
balance between how long does it time? Does it take you to write the code? And how long does the code
run? And when you're in sort of in the phase of exploring solutions, you often spend much more
time writing the code than running it. Because every time you've sort of you've run it, you see that
the output is not quite what you wanted. And you spend some more time coding. And a language like
Python just makes that iteration much faster, because there are fewer details. There is a large
library, sort of there are fewer details that that you have to get right before your program
compiles and runs. There are libraries that do all sorts of stuff for you. So you can sort of very
quickly take a bunch of existing components, put them together and get your prototype application
running, just like when I was building electronics, I was using a breadboard most of the time. So I had
this like, sprawl out circuit that if you shook it, it would stop working because it was not put
together very well. But it functioned. And all I wanted was to see that it worked and then move
on to the next, next schematic or design or add something to it. Once you've sort of figured out,
oh, this is the perfect design for my radio or light sensor or whatever, then you can say, okay,
how do we design a PCB for this? How do we solder the components in a small space? How do we make
it so that it is robust against, say, voltage fluctuations or mechanical disruption? I mean,
I know nothing about that when it comes to designing electronics, but I know a lot about that
when it comes to writing code. So the initial initial steps are efficient, fast, and there's
not much stuff that gets in the way. But you're kind of describing from like Darwin described the
evolution of species, right? You're observing of what is true about Python. Now, if you take
a step back, if the act of creating languages is art, and you had three months to do it,
initial steps, so you just specified a bunch of goals, sort of things that you observe about
Python, perhaps you had those goals, but how do you create the rules, the syntactic structure,
the features that result in those. So I have, in the beginning, and I have follow up questions
about through the evolution of Python, too, but in the very beginning, when you're sitting there,
creating the lexical analyze or whatever evolution was still a big part of it, because
I sort of I said to myself, I don't want to have to design everything from scratch, I'm going to
borrow features from other languages that I like. Oh, interesting. So you basically, exactly, you
first observe what you like. Yeah. And so that's why if you're 17 years old, and you want to
sort of create a programming language, you're not going to be very successful at it.
Because you have no experience with other languages. Whereas I was in my,
let's say mid 30s. I had written parsers before. So I had worked on the implementation of ABC.
I had spent years debating the design of ABC with its authors, with its designers, I had nothing to
do with the design that was designed fully as it was ended up being implemented when I joined the
team. But so you borrow ideas and concepts and very concrete sort of local rules from different
languages, like the indentation and certain other syntactic features from ABC. But I chose
to borrow string literals and how numbers work from C and various other things. So in then,
if you take that further, so yet, you've had this funny sounding, but I think surprisingly
accurate and at least practical title of benevolent dictator for life for quite, you know, for
the last three decades or whatever, or no, not the actual title, but functionally speaking.
So you had to make decisions, design decisions.
Can you maybe let's take Python two, so Python releasing Python three as an example.
It's not backward compatible to Python two in ways that a lot of people know. So what was that
deliberation discussion decision like? Yeah, what was the psychology of that experience? Do you
regret any aspects of how that experience undergone that? Well, yeah, so it was a group process,
really. At that point, even though I was BDFL in name and certainly everybody sort of respected my
position as the creator and the current sort of owner of the language design,
I was looking at everyone else for feedback, sort of Python 3.0 in some sense was sparked by other
people in the community pointing out, oh, well, there are a few issues that sort of bite users over
and over. Can we do something about that? And for Python 3, we took a number of those Python
words as they were called at the time. And we said, can we try to sort of make small changes to the
language that address those words? And we had sort of, in the past, we had always taken backwards
compatibility very seriously. And so many Python words in earlier versions had already been resolved
because they could be resolved while maintaining backwards compatibility or sort of using a very
gradual path of evolution of the language in a certain area. And so we were stuck with a number
of words that were widely recognized as problems, not like roadblocks, but nevertheless sort of
things that some people trip over. And you know that that's always the same thing that that people
trip over when they trip. And we could not think of a backwards compatible way of resolving those
issues. But it's still an option to not resolve the issues. And so yes, for a long time, we had
sort of resigned ourselves to well, okay, the language is not going to be perfect in this way
and that way and that way. And we sort of certain of these I mean, there are still plenty of things
where you can say, well, that's that particular detail is better in Java or in our or in visual
basic or whatever. And we're okay with that, because well, we can't easily change it. It's
not too bad, we can do a little bit with user education, or we can have static analyzer or
warnings in in the parse or something. But there were things where we thought, well, these are
really problems that are not going away, they're getting worse. In the future, we should do something
about it. Do something. But ultimately, there is a decision to be made, right? Yes. So
was that the toughest decision in the history of Python you had to make as the benevolent
dictator for life? Or if not, what are other maybe even on a smaller scale, what was the
decision where you were really torn up about? Well, the toughest decision was probably to resign.
All right, let's go there. Hold on a second, then let me just because in the interest of time,
too, because I have a few cool questions for you. And let's touch a really important one because
it was quite dramatic and beautiful in certain kinds of ways. In July this year, three months ago,
you wrote, now that PEP 572 is done, I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find
that so many people despise my decisions. I would like to remove myself entirely from the decision
process. I'll still be there for a while as an ordinary core developer. And I'll still be available
to mentor people, possibly more available. But I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation
from being BDFL, benevolent dictator for life. And you all will be on your own. First of all,
just it's almost Shakespearean. I'm not going to appoint a successor. So what are you all going
to do? Create a democracy, anarchy, a dictatorship, a federation. So that was a very dramatic and
beautiful set of statements. It's open-ended nature. Call the community to create a future
for Python. This is kind of a beautiful aspect to it. And dramatic, you know. What was making
that decision like? What was on your heart, on your mind, stepping back now a few months later?
Taking it to your mind. I'm glad you liked the writing because it was actually written pretty
quickly. It was literally something like after months and months of going around in circles,
I had finally approved PEP 572, which I had a big hand in its design, although I didn't initiate
it originally. I sort of gave it a bunch of nudges in a direction that would be better for
the language. So sorry, just to ask, is Async.io the one or no? No, PEP 572 was actually a small
feature, which is assignment expressions. Oh, assignment expressions, okay. That had been,
there was just a lot of debate where a lot of people claimed that they knew what was
Pythonic and what was not Pythonic. And they knew that this was going to destroy the language.
This was like a violation of Python's most fundamental design philosophy. And I thought
that was all bullshit because I was in favor of it. And I would think I know something about
Python's design philosophy. So I was really tired and also stressed of that thing. And literally
after sort of announcing I was going to accept it, a certain Wednesday evening,
I had finally sent the email, it's accepted. Now let's just go implement it. So I went to bed
feeling really relieved. That's behind me. And I wake up Thursday morning, 7am. And I think,
well, that was the last one. That's going to be such such a terrible debate. And that's
it going to be said. That's the last time that I let myself be so stressed out about a PEP decision.
Yeah, I should just resign. I've been sort of thinking about retirement for half a decade. I've
been joking and sort of mentioning retirement, sort of telling the community, some point in the
future, I'm going to retire. Don't take that FL part of my title too literally. And I thought,
okay, this is it. I'm done. I had the day off. I wanted to have a good time with my wife. We
were going to a little beach town nearby. And in, I think maybe 15, 20 minutes, I wrote that thing
that you just call Shakespearean. And the funny thing is, I'm going to get so much crap for calling
a Shakespearean. I didn't even, I didn't even realize what a monumental decision it was.
Because five minutes later, I read that a link to my message back on Twitter,
where people were already discussing on Twitter, Guido resigned as the BDFL.
And I had, I had posted it on an internal forum that I thought was only read by core developers.
So I thought I would at least have one day before the news would sort of get out.
The on your own aspect, I had also an element of quite,
it was quite a powerful element of the uncertainty that lies ahead. But can you also just briefly
talk about, you know, like for example, I play guitar as a hobby for fun. And whenever I play,
people are super positive. They're super friendly. They're like, this is awesome. This is great.
But sometimes I enter as an outside observer, I enter the programming community. And there seems
to some, sometimes be camps on whatever the topic. And, and the two camps, the two or plus camps,
are often pretty harsh at criticizing the opposing camps as an onlooker. I may be totally
wrong on this. Yeah, holy wars are, are sort of a favorite activity in the programming community.
And what is the psychology behind that? Is, is that okay for a healthy community to have?
Is that, is that a productive force ultimately for the evolution of a language?
Well, if everybody is batting each other on the back and never telling the truth,
yes, it would not be a good thing. I think there is a middle ground where sort of
being nasty to each other is not okay. But there, there is, is, is a middle ground where there is
healthy ongoing criticism and feedback that is very productive. And you mean at, at every level,
you see that, I mean, someone proposes to fix a very small issue in a code base.
Chances are that some reviewer will sort of respond by saying, well, actually, you can do it
better the other way. Right. When it comes to deciding on the future of the Python core developer
community, we now have, I think, five or six competing proposals for a constitution.
So that future, do you have a fear of that future? Do you have a hope for that future?
I'm very confident about that future. And by and large, I think that the debate has been very healthy
and productive. And I actually, when, when I wrote that resignation email, I knew that,
that Python was in a very good spot. And that the Python core development community,
that the group of 50 or 100 people who sort of write or review most of the code that goes into
Python, those people get along very well most of the time. A large number of different areas of
expertise are represented different levels of experience in the Python core dev community,
different levels of experience completely outside it in software development in general,
large systems, small systems, embedded systems. So I felt okay, resigning because I knew that
that the community can really take care of itself. And out of a grab bag of future feature
developments, let me ask if you can comment maybe on all very quickly, concurrent programming,
parallel computing, async IO, these are the things that people have expressed hope,
complained about, whatever have discussed on Reddit, async IO, so the parallelization in
general, packaging, I was totally close on this, I just use pip install stuff, but apparently,
there's pip and poetry, there's these dependency, packaging systems that manage dependencies,
and so on, they're emerging, and there's a lot of confusion about what's, what's the right thing
to use. Then also, functional programming, the ever, you know, the, the, we're going to get more
functional programming or not, this kind of, this kind of idea. And of course, the, the, the GIL,
as a, connected to the parallelization, I suppose, the global interpreter lock problem.
Can you just comment on whichever you want to comment on? Well, let's take the GIL and
parallelization and async IO as one, one topic. I'm not that hopeful that Python will develop
into a sort of high concurrency, high parallelism language. That's sort of the, the way the language
is designed, the way most users use the language, the way the language is implemented, all make
that a pretty unlikely future. So you think it might not even need to really the way people use
it? It might not be something that should be of great concern. I think, I think async IO is a
special case, because it sort of allows overlapping IO and only IO. And that is, is a sort of best
practice of supporting very high throughput IO, many connections per second. I'm not worried
about that. I think async IO will evolve. There are a couple of competing packages. We have some
very smart people who are sort of pushing us in sort of, to make async IO better. Parallel
computing, I think that Python is not the language for that. There are, there are ways to work around
it. But you sort of, you can't expect to write an algorithm in Python and have a compiler automatically
paralyze that. What you can do is use a package like NumPy, and there are a bunch of other very
powerful packages that sort of use all the CPUs available, because you tell the package, here's
the data, here's the abstract operation to apply over it, go at it, and then then we're back in the
C++ world. But the those packages are themselves implemented usually in C++.
That's right. That's where TensorFlow and all these packages come in where they parallelize
across GPUs, for example, they take care of that for you. So in terms of packaging, can you comment
on the packaging? Yeah, my packaging has always been my least favorite topic. It's, it's, it's a
really tough problem because the OS and the platform want to own packaging. But their packaging
solution is not specific to a language. Like, if you take Linux, there are two competing packaging
solutions for Linux, or for Unix in, in general. And but they all work across all languages. And
several languages like Node, JavaScript, and Ruby and Python all have their own packaging
solutions that only work within the ecosystem of that language. Well, what should you use?
That is a tough problem. My own, own approach is I use the system packaging system to install
Python, and I use the Python packaging system then to install third party Python packages.
That's what most people do. 10 years ago, Python packaging was really a terrible situation.
Nowadays, PIP is the future. There is, there is a separate ecosystem for numerical and scientific
Python, Python based on anaconda. Those two can live together. I don't think there is a need for
more than that. Great. So that's, that's packaging. That's, well, at least for me, that's, that's
where I've been extremely happy. I didn't, I didn't even know this was an issue until it was
brought up. Well, in the interest of time, let me sort of skip through a million other questions I
have. So I watched the five hour, five, five and a half hour oral history that you've done with the
computer history museum. And the nice thing about it, it gave this, because of the linear
progression of the interview, it gave this feeling of a life, you know, a life well lived with
interesting things in it. Sort of a pretty, I would say a good spend of, of this little
existence we have on earth. So outside of your family, looking back, what about this journey
are you really proud of? Are there moments that stand out? Accomplishments, ideas? Is it
the creation of Python itself that stands out as the thing that you look back and say, damn,
I did pretty good there. Well, I would say that Python is definitely the best thing I've ever done.
And I wouldn't sort of say just the creation of Python, but the way I sort of raised Python, like a
baby, I didn't just conceive a child, but I raised a child. And now I'm setting the child free in the
world. And I've set up the child to to sort of be able to take care of himself. And I'm very proud of
that. And as the announcer of Monty Python's Flying Circus used to say, and now for something
completely different, do you have a favorite Monty Python moment or a moment in hitchhiking's
guide or any other literature show, a movie that cracks you up when you think about it?
Oh, you can always play me the Parrots, the dead Parrots catch.
Oh, that's brilliant. Yeah, that's my favorite as well.
It's pushing up the daisies.
Okay, Greta, thank you so much for talking to me today.
This has been a great conversation.