UPDATED 12:01 EDT / DECEMBER 10 2012

NEWS

Dropbox Steals the Creator of Python from Google

Dropbox is looking to strengthen and scale their storage service, and it just announced moments ago that it hired one of the senior executives within Google: Guido Van Rossum.

For those not familiar with Guido Van Rossum, he is affectionately named “Benevolent Dictator For Life” (BFDL), which means he has a lot of influence in how open source software moves foward, and author of Python, the programming language now used by Google, Dropbox, NASA, CERN and Twitter to name just a few. The other BFDL title owners after Van Rossum are computer science legends like Linus Torvalds for developing Linux and David Heinemeier Hansson for developing Ruby on Rails.

“Today’s my last day at Google. In January I start a new job at Dropbox. We’re parting as the best of friends,” van Rossum posted to his Google Plus profile.

Since Dropbox is supported on Python, the appointment of the “father of Python” is an excellent move. Guido Van Rossum has been working for Google since 2005, and should be a huge help as Dropbox is built on Python.

Python has been an inception of Dropbox since its early days as it supports every major operating system and allows writing code once but deploying it across platforms. Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston is known to fond of Python language and it helped the storage company to scale its services to support over 100 million users saving over one billion files per day.

“It’s been five years since our first prototype was saved as dropbox.py, and Guido and the Python community have been crucial in helping us solve interesting challenges for more than 100 million people,” Houston said in an official blog post.

Python is an object-oriented, interpreted computer programming language, but also a powerful general-purpose language, already has nearly two decades of development history. According to the TIOBE Software Index, Python is the 8th popular programing language and the third most commonly used language on the Internet’s largest code repository, GitHub.


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