Guido at Google

[Alex Martelli]

<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;-)]...).


Alex