Guido at Google

[bonono at gmail.com]

Alex Martelli wrote:
> <bonono at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Anand wrote:
> > > This is very good news. I wish Guido all the best!
> > >
> > > I wonder if this has got to do something with Microsoft developing
> > > IronPython. Incidentellay it is reaching a 1.0 release pretty soon.
> > > Perhaps Google has some cards up their sleeve. What other best way to
> > > counter this than to hire the big fish himself ? :-)
> > I wonder how high a particular programming language is in the prioirty
> > of either organisations of such size ?
>
> Interesting question.  I would expect, without any inside knowledge,
> that Java, for example, is pretty high "in the priority of an
> organization" (guess which one?) whose size (number of employees) is, I
> believe, quite a bit larger than Google's.  Microsoft used to have a
> "particular programming language" (Visual Basic) in quite a strategic
> role in their array of products, and although you'd now have to consider
> a small set instead (including C#) it seems to me they still do.  As for
> Google, well, I believe there is exactly one (1) person you'll find
> identified on the web as both a "Google Fellow" AND a Google
> vice-president, and his page from when he was a professor at UCSB
> (before he joined Google) is still on the web, too: guess what field his
> research was in...?  But I guess this is about programming languages in
> general, rather than "a particular one" (and indeed, neither MS, nor
> Google, nor the other organization above mentioned, have ever been
> "single-programming-language" cultures [net of the very early times when
> Basic was MS's only product, of course;-)]...).
>
The question was specifically to the previous question it is responsed
to and if its context or meaning have been read otherwise(intended or
not intended), there isn't much I can do.