WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:05.680 The following is a conversation with Guido van Rossum, creator of Python, one of the most popular 00:05.680 --> 00:11.120 programming languages in the world, used in almost any application that involves computers 00:11.120 --> 00:17.760 from web back end development to psychology, neuroscience, computer vision, robotics, deep 00:17.760 --> 00:24.560 learning, natural language processing, and almost any subfield of AI. This conversation is part of 00:24.560 --> 00:29.280 MIT course on artificial general intelligence and the artificial intelligence podcast. 00:29.280 --> 00:36.080 If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, or your podcast provider of choice, or simply connect 00:36.080 --> 00:44.720 with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled F R I D. And now, here's my conversation with Guido van 00:44.720 --> 00:53.120 Rossum. You were born in the Netherlands in 1956. Your parents and the world around you was deeply 00:53.120 --> 01:00.080 deeply impacted by World War Two, as was my family from the Soviet Union. So with that context, 01:02.000 --> 01:07.360 what is your view of human nature? Are some humans inherently good, 01:07.360 --> 01:12.240 and some inherently evil? Or do we all have both good and evil within us? 01:12.240 --> 01:23.920 Guido van Rossum Ouch, I did not expect such a deep one. I, I guess we all have good and evil 01:24.880 --> 01:31.440 potential in us. And a lot of it depends on circumstances and context. 01:31.440 --> 01:38.800 Peter Bell out of that world, at least on the Soviet Union side in Europe, sort of out of 01:38.800 --> 01:46.480 suffering, out of challenge, out of that kind of set of traumatic events, often emerges beautiful 01:46.480 --> 01:53.200 art, music, literature. In an interview I read or heard, you said you enjoyed Dutch literature 01:54.320 --> 01:59.760 when you were a child. Can you tell me about the books that had an influence on you in your 01:59.760 --> 02:01.520 childhood? Guido van Rossum 02:01.520 --> 02:09.120 Well, with as a teenager, my favorite writer was my favorite Dutch author was a guy named Willem 02:09.120 --> 02:19.440 Frederik Hermans, who's writing, certainly his early novels were all about sort of 02:19.440 --> 02:30.480 ambiguous things that happened during World War Two. I think he was a young adult during that time. 02:31.600 --> 02:40.800 And he wrote about it a lot, and very interesting, very good books, I thought, I think. 02:40.800 --> 02:42.560 Peter Bell In a nonfiction way? 02:42.560 --> 02:46.400 Guido van Rossum No, it was all fiction, but it was 02:46.400 --> 02:52.640 very much set in the ambiguous world of resistance against the Germans, 02:54.560 --> 03:03.840 where often you couldn't tell whether someone was truly in the resistance or really a spy for the 03:03.840 --> 03:11.280 Germans. And some of the characters in his novels sort of crossed that line, and you never really 03:11.280 --> 03:13.840 find out what exactly happened. 03:13.840 --> 03:16.880 Peter Bell And in his novels, there's always a 03:16.880 --> 03:22.160 good guy and a bad guy, the nature of good and evil. Is it clear there's a hero? 03:22.160 --> 03:25.120 Guido van Rossum No, his heroes are often more, 03:25.120 --> 03:34.000 his main characters are often anti heroes. And so they're not very heroic. They're often, 03:36.640 --> 03:40.800 they fail at some level to accomplish their lofty goals. 03:40.800 --> 03:43.040 Peter Bell And looking at the trajectory 03:43.040 --> 03:48.880 through the rest of your life, has literature, Dutch or English or translation had an impact 03:50.560 --> 03:54.160 outside the technical world that you existed in? 03:54.160 --> 03:59.920 Guido van Rossum I still read novels. 04:00.640 --> 04:05.200 I don't think that it impacts me that much directly. 04:05.200 --> 04:07.280 Peter Bell It doesn't impact your work. 04:07.280 --> 04:10.080 Guido van Rossum It's a separate world. 04:10.080 --> 04:17.440 My work is highly technical and sort of the world of art and literature doesn't really 04:17.440 --> 04:19.120 directly have any bearing on it. 04:19.120 --> 04:22.400 Peter Bell You don't think there's a creative element 04:22.400 --> 04:26.880 to the design? You know, some would say design of a language is art. 04:26.880 --> 04:32.160 Guido van Rossum I'm not disagreeing with that. 04:32.160 --> 04:39.360 I'm just saying that sort of I don't feel direct influences from more traditional art 04:39.360 --> 04:40.880 on my own creativity. 04:40.880 --> 04:43.280 Peter Bell Right. Of course, you don't feel doesn't mean 04:43.280 --> 04:46.000 it's not somehow deeply there in your subconscious. 04:46.000 --> 04:48.240 Guido van Rossum Who knows? 04:48.240 --> 04:51.200 Peter Bell Who knows? So let's go back to your early 04:51.200 --> 04:57.440 teens. Your hobbies were building electronic circuits, building mechanical models. 04:57.440 --> 05:06.080 What if you can just put yourself back in the mind of that young Guido 12, 13, 14, was 05:06.080 --> 05:12.240 that grounded in a desire to create a system? So to create something? Or was it more just 05:12.240 --> 05:14.720 tinkering? Just the joy of puzzle solving? 05:14.720 --> 05:18.720 Guido van Rossum I think it was more the latter, actually. 05:18.720 --> 05:29.920 I maybe towards the end of my high school period, I felt confident enough that that 05:29.920 --> 05:39.120 I designed my own circuits that were sort of interesting somewhat. But a lot of that 05:39.120 --> 05:46.000 time, I literally just took a model kit and follow the instructions, putting the things 05:46.000 --> 05:51.680 together. I mean, I think the first few years that I built electronics kits, I really did 05:51.680 --> 05:59.760 not have enough understanding of sort of electronics to really understand what I was doing. I mean, 05:59.760 --> 06:06.480 I could debug it, and I could sort of follow the instructions very carefully, which has 06:06.480 --> 06:14.560 always stayed with me. But I had a very naive model of, like, how do I build a circuit? 06:14.560 --> 06:22.800 Of, like, how a transistor works? And I don't think that in those days, I had any understanding 06:22.800 --> 06:32.560 of coils and capacitors, which actually sort of was a major problem when I started to build 06:32.560 --> 06:39.840 more complex digital circuits, because I was unaware of the sort of the analog part of 06:39.840 --> 06:50.080 the – how they actually work. And I would have things that – the schematic looked 06:50.080 --> 06:57.440 – everything looked fine, and it didn't work. And what I didn't realize was that 06:57.440 --> 07:02.720 there was some megahertz level oscillation that was throwing the circuit off, because 07:02.720 --> 07:13.360 I had a sort of – two wires were too close, or the switches were kind of poorly built. 07:13.360 --> 07:19.280 But through that time, I think it's really interesting and instructive to think about, 07:19.280 --> 07:24.600 because echoes of it are in this time now. So in the 1970s, the personal computer was 07:24.600 --> 07:33.200 being born. So did you sense, in tinkering with these circuits, did you sense the encroaching 07:33.200 --> 07:39.320 revolution in personal computing? So if at that point, we would sit you down and ask 07:39.320 --> 07:46.040 you to predict the 80s and the 90s, do you think you would be able to do so successfully 07:46.040 --> 07:55.560 to unroll the process that's happening? No, I had no clue. I remember, I think, in 07:55.560 --> 08:03.060 the summer after my senior year – or maybe it was the summer after my junior year – well, 08:03.060 --> 08:11.600 at some point, I think, when I was 18, I went on a trip to the Math Olympiad in Eastern 08:11.600 --> 08:16.920 Europe, and there was like – I was part of the Dutch team, and there were other nerdy 08:16.920 --> 08:23.040 kids that sort of had different experiences, and one of them told me about this amazing 08:23.040 --> 08:31.840 thing called a computer. And I had never heard that word. My own explorations in electronics 08:31.840 --> 08:40.420 were sort of about very simple digital circuits, and I had sort of – I had the idea that 08:40.420 --> 08:49.760 I somewhat understood how a digital calculator worked. And so there is maybe some echoes 08:49.760 --> 08:56.440 of computers there, but I never made that connection. I didn't know that when my parents 08:56.440 --> 09:03.520 were paying for magazine subscriptions using punched cards, that there was something called 09:03.520 --> 09:08.260 a computer that was involved that read those cards and transferred the money between accounts. 09:08.260 --> 09:15.880 I was also not really interested in those things. It was only when I went to university 09:15.880 --> 09:23.120 to study math that I found out that they had a computer, and students were allowed to use 09:23.120 --> 09:24.120 it. 09:24.120 --> 09:27.800 And there were some – you're supposed to talk to that computer by programming it. 09:27.800 --> 09:29.920 What did that feel like, finding – 09:29.920 --> 09:35.440 Yeah, that was the only thing you could do with it. The computer wasn't really connected 09:35.440 --> 09:41.400 to the real world. The only thing you could do was sort of – you typed your program 09:41.400 --> 09:47.840 on a bunch of punched cards. You gave the punched cards to the operator, and an hour 09:47.840 --> 09:55.520 later the operator gave you back your printout. And so all you could do was write a program 09:55.520 --> 10:04.080 that did something very abstract. And I don't even remember what my first forays into programming 10:04.080 --> 10:13.440 were, but they were sort of doing simple math exercises and just to learn how a programming 10:13.440 --> 10:15.560 language worked. 10:15.560 --> 10:21.680 Did you sense, okay, first year of college, you see this computer, you're able to have 10:21.680 --> 10:29.420 a program and it generates some output. Did you start seeing the possibility of this, 10:29.420 --> 10:34.920 or was it a continuation of the tinkering with circuits? Did you start to imagine that 10:34.920 --> 10:42.460 one, the personal computer, but did you see it as something that is a tool, like a word 10:42.460 --> 10:47.160 processing tool, maybe for gaming or something? Or did you start to imagine that it could 10:47.160 --> 10:53.860 be going to the world of robotics, like the Frankenstein picture that you could create 10:53.860 --> 10:59.640 an artificial being? There's like another entity in front of you. You did not see the 10:59.640 --> 11:00.640 computer. 11:00.640 --> 11:05.840 I don't think I really saw it that way. I was really more interested in the tinkering. 11:05.840 --> 11:14.920 It's maybe not a sort of a complete coincidence that I ended up sort of creating a programming 11:14.920 --> 11:20.360 language which is a tool for other programmers. I've always been very focused on the sort 11:20.360 --> 11:28.920 of activity of programming itself and not so much what happens with the program you 11:28.920 --> 11:29.920 write. 11:29.920 --> 11:30.920 Right. 11:30.920 --> 11:37.800 I do remember, and I don't remember, maybe in my second or third year, probably my second 11:37.800 --> 11:46.680 actually, someone pointed out to me that there was this thing called Conway's Game of Life. 11:46.680 --> 11:50.480 You're probably familiar with it. I think – 11:50.480 --> 11:53.200 In the 70s, I think is when they came up with it. 11:53.200 --> 12:00.840 So there was a Scientific American column by someone who did a monthly column about 12:00.840 --> 12:06.580 mathematical diversions. I'm also blanking out on the guy's name. It was very famous 12:06.580 --> 12:12.440 at the time and I think up to the 90s or so. And one of his columns was about Conway's 12:12.440 --> 12:18.160 Game of Life and he had some illustrations and he wrote down all the rules and sort of 12:18.160 --> 12:23.720 there was the suggestion that this was philosophically interesting, that that was why Conway had 12:23.720 --> 12:31.480 called it that. And all I had was like the two pages photocopy of that article. I don't 12:31.480 --> 12:40.200 even remember where I got it. But it spoke to me and I remember implementing a version 12:40.200 --> 12:49.000 of that game for the batch computer we were using where I had a whole Pascal program that 12:49.000 --> 12:56.480 sort of read an initial situation from input and read some numbers that said do so many 12:56.480 --> 13:05.960 generations and print every so many generations and then out would come pages and pages of 13:05.960 --> 13:08.480 sort of things. 13:08.480 --> 13:18.360 I remember much later I've done a similar thing using Python but that original version 13:18.360 --> 13:27.700 I wrote at the time I found interesting because I combined it with some trick I had learned 13:27.700 --> 13:36.000 during my electronics hobbyist times. I essentially first on paper I designed a simple circuit 13:36.000 --> 13:45.780 built out of logic gates that took nine bits of input which is sort of the cell and its 13:45.780 --> 13:54.040 neighbors and produced a new value for that cell and it's like a combination of a half 13:54.040 --> 14:01.040 adder and some other clipping. It's actually a full adder. And so I had worked that out 14:01.040 --> 14:10.520 and then I translated that into a series of Boolean operations on Pascal integers where 14:10.520 --> 14:21.740 you could use the integers as bitwise values. And so I could basically generate 60 bits 14:21.740 --> 14:28.800 of a generation in like eight instructions or so. 14:28.800 --> 14:29.800 Nice. 14:29.800 --> 14:32.560 So I was proud of that. 14:32.560 --> 14:38.120 It's funny that you mentioned, so for people who don't know Conway's Game of Life, it's 14:38.120 --> 14:44.840 a cellular automata where there's single compute units that kind of look at their neighbors 14:44.840 --> 14:50.080 and figure out what they look like in the next generation based on the state of their 14:50.080 --> 14:57.840 neighbors and this is deeply distributed system in concept at least. And then there's simple 14:57.840 --> 15:04.400 rules that all of them follow and somehow out of this simple rule when you step back 15:04.400 --> 15:13.160 and look at what occurs, it's beautiful. There's an emergent complexity. Even though the underlying 15:13.160 --> 15:17.440 rules are simple, there's an emergent complexity. Now the funny thing is you've implemented 15:17.440 --> 15:23.660 this and the thing you're commenting on is you're proud of a hack you did to make it 15:23.660 --> 15:30.800 run efficiently. When you're not commenting on, it's a beautiful implementation, you're 15:30.800 --> 15:36.780 not commenting on the fact that there's an emergent complexity that you've coded a simple 15:36.780 --> 15:42.960 program and when you step back and you print out the following generation after generation, 15:42.960 --> 15:48.400 that's stuff that you may have not predicted would happen is happening. 15:48.400 --> 15:53.600 And is that magic? I mean, that's the magic that all of us feel when we program. When 15:53.600 --> 15:59.240 you create a program and then you run it and whether it's Hello World or it shows something 15:59.240 --> 16:03.840 on screen, if there's a graphical component, are you seeing the magic in the mechanism 16:03.840 --> 16:05.200 of creating that? 16:05.200 --> 16:14.440 I think I went back and forth. As a student, we had an incredibly small budget of computer 16:14.440 --> 16:20.280 time that we could use. It was actually measured. I once got in trouble with one of my professors 16:20.280 --> 16:29.640 because I had overspent the department's budget. It's a different story. 16:29.640 --> 16:36.900 I actually wanted the efficient implementation because I also wanted to explore what would 16:36.900 --> 16:48.560 happen with a larger number of generations and a larger size of the board. Once the implementation 16:48.560 --> 16:57.000 was flawless, I would feed it different patterns and then I think maybe there was a follow 16:57.000 --> 17:03.620 up article where there were patterns that were like gliders, patterns that repeated 17:03.620 --> 17:13.200 themselves after a number of generations but translated one or two positions to the right 17:13.200 --> 17:21.720 or up or something like that. I remember things like glider guns. Well, you can Google Conway's 17:21.720 --> 17:27.560 Game of Life. People still go aww and ooh over it. 17:27.560 --> 17:32.680 For a reason because it's not really well understood why. I mean, this is what Stephen 17:32.680 --> 17:40.240 Wolfram is obsessed about. We don't have the mathematical tools to describe the kind of 17:40.240 --> 17:45.120 complexity that emerges in these kinds of systems. The only way you can do is to run 17:45.120 --> 17:47.120 it. 17:47.120 --> 17:55.720 I'm not convinced that it's sort of a problem that lends itself to classic mathematical 17:55.720 --> 17:59.920 analysis. 17:59.920 --> 18:05.120 One theory of how you create an artificial intelligence or artificial being is you kind 18:05.120 --> 18:10.120 of have to, same with the Game of Life, you kind of have to create a universe and let 18:10.120 --> 18:17.520 it run. That creating it from scratch in a design way, coding up a Python program that 18:17.520 --> 18:22.760 creates a fully intelligent system may be quite challenging. You might need to create 18:22.760 --> 18:27.120 a universe just like the Game of Life. 18:27.120 --> 18:33.200 You might have to experiment with a lot of different universes before there is a set 18:33.200 --> 18:41.480 of rules that doesn't essentially always just end up repeating itself in a trivial 18:41.480 --> 18:42.480 way. 18:42.480 --> 18:49.840 Yeah, and Stephen Wolfram works with these simple rules, says that it's kind of surprising 18:49.840 --> 18:55.280 how quickly you find rules that create interesting things. You shouldn't be able to, but somehow 18:55.280 --> 19:02.120 you do. And so maybe our universe is laden with rules that will create interesting things 19:02.120 --> 19:07.440 that might not look like humans, but emergent phenomena that's interesting may not be as 19:07.440 --> 19:09.440 difficult to create as we think. 19:09.440 --> 19:10.440 Sure. 19:10.440 --> 19:17.440 But let me sort of ask, at that time, some of the world, at least in popular press, was 19:17.440 --> 19:25.680 kind of captivated, perhaps at least in America, by the idea of artificial intelligence, that 19:25.680 --> 19:33.240 these computers would be able to think pretty soon. And did that touch you at all? In science 19:33.240 --> 19:37.800 fiction or in reality in any way? 19:37.800 --> 19:49.000 I didn't really start reading science fiction until much, much later. I think as a teenager 19:49.000 --> 19:54.520 I read maybe one bundle of science fiction stories. 19:54.520 --> 19:57.960 Was it in the background somewhere, like in your thoughts? 19:57.960 --> 20:04.720 That sort of the using computers to build something intelligent always felt to me, because 20:04.720 --> 20:12.920 I felt I had so much understanding of what actually goes on inside a computer. I knew 20:12.920 --> 20:22.880 how many bits of memory it had and how difficult it was to program. And sort of, I didn't believe 20:22.880 --> 20:30.560 at all that you could just build something intelligent out of that, that would really 20:30.560 --> 20:40.600 sort of satisfy my definition of intelligence. I think the most influential thing that I 20:40.600 --> 20:48.680 read in my early twenties was Gödel Escherbach. That was about consciousness, and that was 20:48.680 --> 20:54.040 a big eye opener in some sense. 20:54.040 --> 21:00.760 In what sense? So, on your own brain, did you at the time or do you now see your own 21:00.760 --> 21:07.720 brain as a computer? Or is there a total separation of the way? So yeah, you're very pragmatically 21:07.720 --> 21:14.600 practically know the limits of memory, the limits of this sequential computing or weakly 21:14.600 --> 21:21.000 paralyzed computing, and you just know what we have now, and it's hard to see how it creates. 21:21.000 --> 21:29.920 But it's also easy to see, it was in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and now at least similarities between 21:29.920 --> 21:31.680 the brain and our computers. 21:31.680 --> 21:43.200 Oh yeah, I mean, I totally believe that brains are computers in some sense. I mean, the rules 21:43.200 --> 21:51.200 they use to play by are pretty different from the rules we can sort of implement in our 21:51.200 --> 22:02.960 current hardware, but I don't believe in, like, a separate thing that infuses us with 22:02.960 --> 22:10.480 intelligence or consciousness or any of that. There's no soul, I've been an atheist 22:10.480 --> 22:18.800 probably from when I was 10 years old, just by thinking a bit about math and the universe, 22:18.800 --> 22:26.640 and well, my parents were atheists. Now, I know that you could be an atheist and still 22:26.640 --> 22:34.080 believe that there is something sort of about intelligence or consciousness that cannot 22:34.080 --> 22:44.560 possibly emerge from a fixed set of rules. I am not in that camp. I totally see that, 22:44.560 --> 22:53.680 sort of, given how many millions of years evolution took its time, DNA is a particular 22:53.680 --> 23:07.040 machine that sort of encodes information and an unlimited amount of information in chemical 23:07.040 --> 23:12.320 form and has figured out a way to replicate itself. 23:12.320 --> 23:16.880 I thought that that was, maybe it's 300 million years ago, but I thought it was closer 23:16.880 --> 23:25.120 to half a billion years ago, that that's sort of originated and it hasn't really changed, 23:25.120 --> 23:32.040 that the sort of the structure of DNA hasn't changed ever since. That is like our binary 23:32.040 --> 23:35.200 code that we have in hardware. I mean... 23:35.200 --> 23:39.760 The basic programming language hasn't changed, but maybe the programming itself... 23:39.760 --> 23:48.320 Obviously, it did sort of, it happened to be a set of rules that was good enough to 23:48.320 --> 23:59.520 sort of develop endless variability and sort of the idea of self replicating molecules 23:59.520 --> 24:05.360 competing with each other for resources and one type eventually sort of always taking 24:05.360 --> 24:12.320 over. That happened before there were any fossils, so we don't know how that exactly 24:12.320 --> 24:17.920 happened, but I believe it's clear that that did happen. 24:17.920 --> 24:25.360 Can you comment on consciousness and how you see it? Because I think we'll talk about 24:25.360 --> 24:30.080 programming quite a bit. We'll talk about, you know, intelligence connecting to programming 24:30.080 --> 24:38.080 fundamentally, but consciousness is this whole other thing. Do you think about it often as 24:38.080 --> 24:45.440 a developer of a programming language and as a human? 24:45.440 --> 24:55.000 Those are pretty sort of separate topics. Sort of my line of work working with programming 24:55.000 --> 25:02.720 does not involve anything that goes in the direction of developing intelligence or consciousness, 25:02.720 --> 25:13.880 but sort of privately as an avid reader of popular science writing, I have some thoughts 25:13.880 --> 25:25.680 which is mostly that I don't actually believe that consciousness is an all or nothing thing. 25:25.680 --> 25:35.960 I have a feeling that, and I forget what I read that influenced this, but I feel that 25:35.960 --> 25:41.400 if you look at a cat or a dog or a mouse, they have some form of intelligence. If you 25:41.400 --> 25:54.040 look at a fish, it has some form of intelligence, and that evolution just took a long time, 25:54.040 --> 26:01.320 but I feel that the sort of evolution of more and more intelligence that led to sort of 26:01.320 --> 26:12.920 the human form of intelligence followed the evolution of the senses, especially the visual 26:12.920 --> 26:20.480 sense. I mean, there is an enormous amount of processing that's needed to interpret 26:20.480 --> 26:28.240 a scene, and humans are still better at that than computers are. 26:28.240 --> 26:39.660 And I have a feeling that there is a sort of, the reason that like mammals in particular 26:39.660 --> 26:47.960 developed the levels of consciousness that they have and that eventually sort of going 26:47.960 --> 26:55.360 from intelligence to self awareness and consciousness has to do with sort of being a robot that 26:55.360 --> 26:58.920 has very highly developed senses. 26:58.920 --> 27:04.760 Has a lot of rich sensory information coming in, so that's a really interesting thought 27:04.760 --> 27:14.200 that whatever that basic mechanism of DNA, whatever that basic building blocks of programming, 27:14.200 --> 27:21.080 if you just add more abilities, more high resolution sensors, more sensors, you just 27:21.080 --> 27:26.760 keep stacking those things on top that this basic programming in trying to survive develops 27:26.760 --> 27:35.000 very interesting things that start to us humans to appear like intelligence and consciousness. 27:35.000 --> 27:42.280 As far as robots go, I think that the self driving cars have that sort of the greatest 27:42.280 --> 27:50.400 opportunity of developing something like that, because when I drive myself, I don't just 27:50.400 --> 27:53.800 pay attention to the rules of the road. 27:53.800 --> 28:01.220 I also look around and I get clues from that, oh, this is a shopping district, oh, here's 28:01.220 --> 28:08.960 an old lady crossing the street, oh, here is someone carrying a pile of mail, there's 28:08.960 --> 28:14.040 a mailbox, I bet you they're going to cross the street to reach that mailbox. 28:14.040 --> 28:17.520 And I slow down, and I don't even think about that. 28:17.520 --> 28:25.780 And so, there is so much where you turn your observations into an understanding of what 28:25.780 --> 28:32.680 other consciousnesses are going to do, or what other systems in the world are going 28:32.680 --> 28:37.400 to be, oh, that tree is going to fall. 28:37.400 --> 28:46.800 I see sort of, I see much more of, I expect somehow that if anything is going to become 28:46.800 --> 28:55.520 unconscious, it's going to be the self driving car and not the network of a bazillion computers 28:55.520 --> 29:03.160 in a Google or Amazon data center that are all networked together to do whatever they 29:03.160 --> 29:04.160 do. 29:04.160 --> 29:09.640 So, in that sense, so you actually highlight, because that's what I work in Thomas Vehicles, 29:09.640 --> 29:15.600 you highlight the big gap between what we currently can't do and what we truly need 29:15.600 --> 29:18.500 to be able to do to solve the problem. 29:18.500 --> 29:24.600 Under that formulation, then consciousness and intelligence is something that basically 29:24.600 --> 29:30.020 a system should have in order to interact with us humans, as opposed to some kind of 29:30.020 --> 29:35.280 abstract notion of a consciousness. 29:35.280 --> 29:39.200 Consciousness is something that you need to have to be able to empathize, to be able to 29:39.200 --> 29:47.440 fear, understand what the fear of death is, all these aspects that are important for interacting 29:47.440 --> 29:56.160 with pedestrians, you need to be able to do basic computation based on our human desires 29:56.160 --> 29:57.160 and thoughts. 29:57.160 --> 30:02.280 And if you sort of, yeah, if you look at the dog, the dog clearly knows, I mean, I'm 30:02.280 --> 30:07.340 not the dog owner, but I have friends who have dogs, the dogs clearly know what the 30:07.340 --> 30:11.400 humans around them are going to do, or at least they have a model of what those humans 30:11.400 --> 30:14.160 are going to do and they learn. 30:14.160 --> 30:19.060 Some dogs know when you're going out and they want to go out with you, they're sad when 30:19.060 --> 30:26.080 you leave them alone, they cry, they're afraid because they were mistreated when they were 30:26.080 --> 30:31.040 younger. 30:31.040 --> 30:39.280 We don't assign sort of consciousness to dogs, or at least not all that much, but I also 30:39.280 --> 30:42.500 don't think they have none of that. 30:42.500 --> 30:50.360 So I think it's consciousness and intelligence are not all or nothing. 30:50.360 --> 30:52.780 The spectrum is really interesting. 30:52.780 --> 30:58.760 But in returning to programming languages and the way we think about building these 30:58.760 --> 31:03.260 kinds of things, about building intelligence, building consciousness, building artificial 31:03.260 --> 31:04.260 beings. 31:04.260 --> 31:10.920 So I think one of the exciting ideas came in the 17th century and with Leibniz, Hobbes, 31:10.920 --> 31:18.520 Descartes, where there's this feeling that you can convert all thought, all reasoning, 31:18.520 --> 31:24.480 all the thing that we find very special in our brains, you can convert all of that into 31:24.480 --> 31:25.480 logic. 31:25.480 --> 31:30.400 So you can formalize it, formal reasoning, and then once you formalize everything, all 31:30.400 --> 31:34.400 of knowledge, then you can just calculate and that's what we're doing with our brains 31:34.400 --> 31:35.400 is we're calculating. 31:35.400 --> 31:40.240 So there's this whole idea that this is possible, that this we can actually program. 31:40.240 --> 31:46.520 But they weren't aware of the concept of pattern matching in the sense that we are aware of 31:46.520 --> 31:47.640 it now. 31:47.640 --> 31:57.640 They sort of thought they had discovered incredible bits of mathematics like Newton's calculus 31:57.640 --> 32:06.840 and their sort of idealism, their sort of extension of what they could do with logic 32:06.840 --> 32:18.000 and math sort of went along those lines and they thought there's like, yeah, logic. 32:18.000 --> 32:22.020 There's like a bunch of rules and a bunch of input. 32:22.020 --> 32:28.600 They didn't realize that how you recognize a face is not just a bunch of rules but is 32:28.600 --> 32:39.160 a shit ton of data plus a circuit that sort of interprets the visual clues and the context 32:39.160 --> 32:49.400 and everything else and somehow can massively parallel pattern match against stored rules. 32:49.400 --> 32:56.320 I mean, if I see you tomorrow here in front of the Dropbox office, I might recognize you. 32:56.320 --> 33:01.320 Even if I'm wearing a different shirt, yeah, but if I see you tomorrow in a coffee shop 33:01.320 --> 33:06.640 in Belmont, I might have no idea that it was you or on the beach or whatever. 33:06.640 --> 33:10.160 I make those kind of mistakes myself all the time. 33:10.160 --> 33:16.320 I see someone that I only know as like, oh, this person is a colleague of my wife's and 33:16.320 --> 33:20.860 then I see them at the movies and I didn't recognize them. 33:20.860 --> 33:29.320 But do you see those, you call it pattern matching, do you see that rules is unable 33:29.320 --> 33:32.380 to encode that? 33:32.380 --> 33:36.320 Everything you see, all the pieces of information you look around this room, I'm wearing a black 33:36.320 --> 33:41.720 shirt, I have a certain height, I'm a human, all these, there's probably tens of thousands 33:41.720 --> 33:45.680 of facts you pick up moment by moment about this scene. 33:45.680 --> 33:50.000 You take them for granted and you aggregate them together to understand the scene. 33:50.000 --> 33:53.800 You don't think all of that could be encoded to where at the end of the day, you can just 33:53.800 --> 33:57.440 put it all on the table and calculate? 33:57.440 --> 33:58.840 I don't know what that means. 33:58.840 --> 34:08.680 I mean, yes, in the sense that there is no actual magic there, but there are enough layers 34:08.680 --> 34:17.640 of abstraction from the facts as they enter my eyes and my ears to the understanding of 34:17.640 --> 34:29.240 the scene that I don't think that AI has really covered enough of that distance. 34:29.240 --> 34:37.800 It's like if you take a human body and you realize it's built out of atoms, well, that 34:37.800 --> 34:41.960 is a uselessly reductionist view, right? 34:41.960 --> 34:46.380 The body is built out of organs, the organs are built out of cells, the cells are built 34:46.380 --> 34:53.240 out of proteins, the proteins are built out of amino acids, the amino acids are built 34:53.240 --> 34:58.040 out of atoms and then you get to quantum mechanics. 34:58.040 --> 34:59.920 So that's a very pragmatic view. 34:59.920 --> 35:03.720 I mean, obviously as an engineer, I agree with that kind of view, but you also have 35:03.720 --> 35:13.160 to consider the Sam Harris view of, well, intelligence is just information processing. 35:13.160 --> 35:17.320 Like you said, you take in sensory information, you do some stuff with it and you come up 35:17.320 --> 35:20.760 with actions that are intelligent. 35:20.760 --> 35:22.480 That makes it sound so easy. 35:22.480 --> 35:24.280 I don't know who Sam Harris is. 35:24.280 --> 35:26.400 Oh, well, it's a philosopher. 35:26.400 --> 35:29.680 So like this is how philosophers often think, right? 35:29.680 --> 35:33.760 And essentially that's what Descartes was, is wait a minute, if there is, like you said, 35:33.760 --> 35:39.320 no magic, so he basically says it doesn't appear like there's any magic, but we know 35:39.320 --> 35:44.280 so little about it that it might as well be magic. 35:44.280 --> 35:47.800 So just because we know that we're made of atoms, just because we know we're made 35:47.800 --> 35:53.280 of organs, the fact that we know very little how to get from the atoms to organs in a way 35:53.280 --> 36:00.400 that's recreatable means that you shouldn't get too excited just yet about the fact that 36:00.400 --> 36:02.240 you figured out that we're made of atoms. 36:02.240 --> 36:11.920 Right, and the same about taking facts as our sensory organs take them in and turning 36:11.920 --> 36:19.820 that into reasons and actions, that sort of, there are a lot of abstractions that we haven't 36:19.820 --> 36:23.960 quite figured out how to deal with those. 36:23.960 --> 36:37.440 I mean, sometimes, I don't know if I can go on a tangent or not, so if I take a simple 36:37.440 --> 36:45.640 program that parses, say I have a compiler that parses a program, in a sense the input 36:45.640 --> 36:55.640 routine of that compiler, of that parser, is a sensing organ, and it builds up a mighty 36:55.640 --> 37:01.960 complicated internal representation of the program it just saw, it doesn't just have 37:01.960 --> 37:08.200 a linear sequence of bytes representing the text of the program anymore, it has an abstract 37:08.200 --> 37:15.480 syntax tree, and I don't know how many of your viewers or listeners are familiar with 37:15.480 --> 37:18.680 compiler technology, but there's… 37:18.680 --> 37:21.880 Fewer and fewer these days, right? 37:21.880 --> 37:24.920 That's also true, probably. 37:24.920 --> 37:30.360 People want to take a shortcut, but there's sort of, this abstraction is a data structure 37:30.360 --> 37:37.480 that the compiler then uses to produce outputs that is relevant, like a translation of that 37:37.480 --> 37:47.880 program to machine code that can be executed by hardware, and then that data structure 37:47.880 --> 37:50.600 gets thrown away. 37:50.600 --> 38:02.560 When a fish or a fly sees, sort of gets visual impulses, I'm sure it also builds up some 38:02.560 --> 38:10.000 data structure, and for the fly that may be very minimal, a fly may have only a few, I 38:10.000 --> 38:17.680 mean, in the case of a fly's brain, I could imagine that there are few enough layers of 38:17.680 --> 38:24.040 abstraction that it's not much more than when it's darker here than it is here, well 38:24.040 --> 38:29.880 it can sense motion, because a fly sort of responds when you move your arm towards it, 38:29.880 --> 38:39.240 so clearly its visual processing is intelligent, well, not intelligent, but it has an abstraction 38:39.240 --> 38:46.440 for motion, and we still have similar things in, but much more complicated in our brains, 38:46.440 --> 38:50.400 I mean, otherwise you couldn't drive a car if you couldn't, if you didn't have an 38:50.400 --> 38:53.480 incredibly good abstraction for motion. 38:53.480 --> 38:59.160 Yeah, in some sense, the same abstraction for motion is probably one of the primary 38:59.160 --> 39:05.080 sources of our, of information for us, we just know what to do, I think we know what 39:05.080 --> 39:08.280 to do with that, we've built up other abstractions on top. 39:08.280 --> 39:14.120 We build much more complicated data structures based on that, and we build more persistent 39:14.120 --> 39:20.320 data structures, sort of after some processing, some information sort of gets stored in our 39:20.320 --> 39:27.240 memory pretty much permanently, and is available on recall, I mean, there are some things that 39:27.240 --> 39:34.040 you sort of, you're conscious that you're remembering it, like, you give me your phone 39:34.040 --> 39:39.560 number, I, well, at my age I have to write it down, but I could imagine, I could remember 39:39.560 --> 39:46.240 those seven numbers, or ten digits, and reproduce them in a while, if I sort of repeat them 39:46.240 --> 39:53.320 to myself a few times, so that's a fairly conscious form of memorization. 39:53.320 --> 39:57.800 On the other hand, how do I recognize your face, I have no idea. 39:57.800 --> 40:04.080 My brain has a whole bunch of specialized hardware that knows how to recognize faces, 40:04.080 --> 40:10.200 I don't know how much of that is sort of coded in our DNA, and how much of that is 40:10.200 --> 40:17.960 trained over and over between the ages of zero and three, but somehow our brains know 40:17.960 --> 40:26.000 how to do lots of things like that, that are useful in our interactions with other humans, 40:26.000 --> 40:29.880 without really being conscious of how it's done anymore. 40:29.880 --> 40:36.200 Right, so our actual day to day lives, we're operating at the very highest level of abstraction, 40:36.200 --> 40:39.760 we're just not even conscious of all the little details underlying it. 40:39.760 --> 40:43.360 There's compilers on top of, it's like turtles on top of turtles, or turtles all the way 40:43.360 --> 40:48.200 down, there's compilers all the way down, but that's essentially, you say that there's 40:48.200 --> 40:54.920 no magic, that's what I, what I was trying to get at, I think, is with Descartes started 40:54.920 --> 40:59.600 this whole train of saying that there's no magic, I mean, there's all this beforehand. 40:59.600 --> 41:06.120 Well didn't Descartes also have the notion though that the soul and the body were fundamentally 41:06.120 --> 41:07.120 separate? 41:07.120 --> 41:11.800 Separate, yeah, I think he had to write in God in there for political reasons, so I don't 41:11.800 --> 41:17.880 know actually, I'm not a historian, but there's notions in there that all of reasoning, all 41:17.880 --> 41:20.120 of human thought can be formalized. 41:20.120 --> 41:28.480 I think that continued in the 20th century with Russell and with Gadot's incompleteness 41:28.480 --> 41:33.120 theorem, this debate of what are the limits of the things that could be formalized, that's 41:33.120 --> 41:37.960 where the Turing machine came along, and this exciting idea, I mean, underlying a lot of 41:37.960 --> 41:43.160 computing that you can do quite a lot with a computer. 41:43.160 --> 41:47.640 You can encode a lot of the stuff we're talking about in terms of recognizing faces and so 41:47.640 --> 41:53.960 on, theoretically, in an algorithm that can then run on a computer. 41:53.960 --> 42:05.040 And in that context, I'd like to ask programming in a philosophical way, what does it mean 42:05.040 --> 42:06.480 to program a computer? 42:06.480 --> 42:13.360 So you said you write a Python program or compiled a C++ program that compiles to some 42:13.360 --> 42:21.200 byte code, it's forming layers, you're programming a layer of abstraction that's higher, how 42:21.200 --> 42:24.920 do you see programming in that context? 42:24.920 --> 42:29.800 Can it keep getting higher and higher levels of abstraction? 42:29.800 --> 42:35.960 I think at some point the higher levels of abstraction will not be called programming 42:35.960 --> 42:44.720 and they will not resemble what we call programming at the moment. 42:44.720 --> 42:52.080 There will not be source code, I mean, there will still be source code sort of at a lower 42:52.080 --> 42:59.320 level of the machine, just like there are still molecules and electrons and sort of 42:59.320 --> 43:09.120 proteins in our brains, but, and so there's still programming and system administration 43:09.120 --> 43:15.960 and who knows what, to keep the machine running, but what the machine does is a different level 43:15.960 --> 43:23.060 of abstraction in a sense, and as far as I understand the way that for the last decade 43:23.060 --> 43:28.440 or more people have made progress with things like facial recognition or the self driving 43:28.440 --> 43:38.200 cars is all by endless, endless amounts of training data where at least as a lay person, 43:38.200 --> 43:47.420 and I feel myself totally as a lay person in that field, it looks like the researchers 43:47.420 --> 43:57.400 who publish the results don't necessarily know exactly how their algorithms work, and 43:57.400 --> 44:04.840 I often get upset when I sort of read a sort of a fluff piece about Facebook in the newspaper 44:04.840 --> 44:12.680 or social networks and they say, well, algorithms, and that's like a totally different interpretation 44:12.680 --> 44:19.240 of the word algorithm, because for me, the way I was trained or what I learned when I 44:19.240 --> 44:25.920 was eight or ten years old, an algorithm is a set of rules that you completely understand 44:25.920 --> 44:30.720 that can be mathematically analyzed and you can prove things. 44:30.720 --> 44:37.840 You can like prove that Aristotelian sieve produces all prime numbers and only prime 44:37.840 --> 44:38.840 numbers. 44:38.840 --> 44:39.840 Yeah. 44:39.840 --> 44:44.360 So I don't know if you know who Andrej Karpathy is, I'm afraid not. 44:44.360 --> 44:51.980 So he's a head of AI at Tesla now, but he was at Stanford before and he has this cheeky 44:51.980 --> 44:56.480 way of calling this concept software 2.0. 44:56.480 --> 45:00.120 So let me disentangle that for a second. 45:00.120 --> 45:06.080 So kind of what you're referring to is the traditional, the algorithm, the concept of 45:06.080 --> 45:09.560 an algorithm, something that's there, it's clear, you can read it, you understand it, 45:09.560 --> 45:14.800 you can prove it's functioning as kind of software 1.0. 45:14.800 --> 45:21.920 And what software 2.0 is, is exactly what you described, which is you have neural networks, 45:21.920 --> 45:26.600 which is a type of machine learning that you feed a bunch of data and that neural network 45:26.600 --> 45:30.200 learns to do a function. 45:30.200 --> 45:35.220 All you specify is the inputs and the outputs you want and you can't look inside. 45:35.220 --> 45:37.040 You can't analyze it. 45:37.040 --> 45:41.920 All you can do is train this function to map the inputs to the outputs by giving a lot 45:41.920 --> 45:42.920 of data. 45:42.920 --> 45:47.040 And that's as programming becomes getting a lot of data. 45:47.040 --> 45:48.920 That's what programming is. 45:48.920 --> 45:52.120 Well, that would be programming 2.0. 45:52.120 --> 45:53.800 To programming 2.0. 45:53.800 --> 45:55.600 I wouldn't call that programming. 45:55.600 --> 45:57.480 It's just a different activity. 45:57.480 --> 46:02.640 Just like building organs out of cells is not called chemistry. 46:02.640 --> 46:09.680 Well, so let's just step back and think sort of more generally, of course. 46:09.680 --> 46:18.080 But you know, it's like as a parent teaching your kids, things can be called programming. 46:18.080 --> 46:22.720 In that same sense, that's how programming is being used. 46:22.720 --> 46:27.080 You're providing them data, examples, use cases. 46:27.080 --> 46:36.680 So imagine writing a function not by, not with for loops and clearly readable text, 46:36.680 --> 46:42.760 but more saying, well, here's a lot of examples of what this function should take. 46:42.760 --> 46:47.860 And here's a lot of examples of when it takes those functions, it should do this. 46:47.860 --> 46:50.280 And then figure out the rest. 46:50.280 --> 46:52.640 So that's the 2.0 concept. 46:52.640 --> 46:58.560 And so the question I have for you is like, it's a very fuzzy way. 46:58.560 --> 47:01.680 This is the reality of a lot of these pattern recognition systems and so on. 47:01.680 --> 47:05.400 It's a fuzzy way of quote unquote programming. 47:05.400 --> 47:09.160 What do you think about this kind of world? 47:09.160 --> 47:13.640 Should it be called something totally different than programming? 47:13.640 --> 47:21.000 If you're a software engineer, does that mean you're designing systems that are very, can 47:21.000 --> 47:28.140 be systematically tested, evaluated, they have a very specific specification and then this 47:28.140 --> 47:33.520 other fuzzy software 2.0 world, machine learning world, that's something else totally? 47:33.520 --> 47:41.000 Or is there some intermixing that's possible? 47:41.000 --> 47:48.600 Well the question is probably only being asked because we don't quite know what that software 47:48.600 --> 47:51.400 2.0 actually is. 47:51.400 --> 48:02.960 And I think there is a truism that every task that AI has tackled in the past, at some point 48:02.960 --> 48:09.160 we realized how it was done and then it was no longer considered part of artificial intelligence 48:09.160 --> 48:15.200 because it was no longer necessary to use that term. 48:15.200 --> 48:21.600 It was just, oh now we know how to do this. 48:21.600 --> 48:30.320 And a new field of science or engineering has been developed and I don't know if sort 48:30.320 --> 48:39.000 of every form of learning or sort of controlling computer systems should always be called programming. 48:39.000 --> 48:43.720 So I don't know, maybe I'm focused too much on the terminology. 48:43.720 --> 48:56.200 But I expect that there just will be different concepts where people with sort of different 48:56.200 --> 49:07.920 education and a different model of what they're trying to do will develop those concepts. 49:07.920 --> 49:17.240 I guess if you could comment on another way to put this concept is, I think the kind of 49:17.240 --> 49:23.480 functions that neural networks provide is things as opposed to being able to upfront 49:23.480 --> 49:28.720 prove that this should work for all cases you throw at it. 49:28.720 --> 49:32.320 All you're able, it's the worst case analysis versus average case analysis. 49:32.320 --> 49:39.800 All you're able to say is it seems on everything we've tested to work 99.9% of the time, but 49:39.800 --> 49:44.160 we can't guarantee it and it fails in unexpected ways. 49:44.160 --> 49:48.080 We can't even give you examples of how it fails in unexpected ways, but it's like really 49:48.080 --> 49:50.120 good most of the time. 49:50.120 --> 50:00.720 Is there no room for that in current ways we think about programming? 50:00.720 --> 50:11.080 programming 1.0 is actually sort of getting to that point too, where the sort of the ideal 50:11.080 --> 50:21.120 of a bug free program has been abandoned long ago by most software developers. 50:21.120 --> 50:30.120 We only care about bugs that manifest themselves often enough to be annoying. 50:30.120 --> 50:40.680 And we're willing to take the occasional crash or outage or incorrect result for granted 50:40.680 --> 50:47.600 because we can't possibly, we don't have enough programmers to make all the code bug free 50:47.600 --> 50:50.200 and it would be an incredibly tedious business. 50:50.200 --> 50:56.320 And if you try to throw formal methods at it, it becomes even more tedious. 50:56.320 --> 51:05.520 So every once in a while the user clicks on a link and somehow they get an error and the 51:05.520 --> 51:07.360 average user doesn't panic. 51:07.360 --> 51:14.840 They just click again and see if it works better the second time, which often magically 51:14.840 --> 51:21.600 it does, or they go up and they try some other way of performing their tasks. 51:21.600 --> 51:29.880 So that's sort of an end to end recovery mechanism and inside systems there is all 51:29.880 --> 51:39.120 sorts of retries and timeouts and fallbacks and I imagine that that sort of biological 51:39.120 --> 51:46.320 systems are even more full of that because otherwise they wouldn't survive. 51:46.320 --> 51:54.160 Do you think programming should be taught and thought of as exactly what you just said? 51:54.160 --> 52:01.560 I come from this kind of, you're always denying that fact always. 52:01.560 --> 52:12.680 In sort of basic programming education, the sort of the programs you're having students 52:12.680 --> 52:23.480 write are so small and simple that if there is a bug you can always find it and fix it. 52:23.480 --> 52:29.720 Because the sort of programming as it's being taught in some, even elementary, middle schools, 52:29.720 --> 52:36.680 in high school, introduction to programming classes in college typically, it's programming 52:36.680 --> 52:38.920 in the small. 52:38.920 --> 52:47.560 Very few classes sort of actually teach software engineering, building large systems. 52:47.560 --> 52:51.360 Every summer here at Dropbox we have a large number of interns. 52:51.360 --> 52:56.720 Every tech company on the West Coast has the same thing. 52:56.720 --> 53:02.520 These interns are always amazed because this is the first time in their life that they 53:02.520 --> 53:12.920 see what goes on in a really large software development environment. 53:12.920 --> 53:20.280 Everything they've learned in college was almost always about a much smaller scale and 53:20.280 --> 53:27.840 somehow that difference in scale makes a qualitative difference in how you do things and how you 53:27.840 --> 53:29.600 think about it. 53:29.600 --> 53:36.300 If you then take a few steps back into decades, 70s and 80s, when you were first thinking 53:36.300 --> 53:41.840 about Python or just that world of programming languages, did you ever think that there would 53:41.840 --> 53:46.720 be systems as large as underlying Google, Facebook, and Dropbox? 53:46.720 --> 53:51.440 Did you, when you were thinking about Python? 53:51.440 --> 53:57.520 I was actually always caught by surprise by sort of this, yeah, pretty much every stage 53:57.520 --> 53:59.680 of computing. 53:59.680 --> 54:07.280 So maybe just because you've spoken in other interviews, but I think the evolution of programming 54:07.280 --> 54:13.080 languages are fascinating and it's especially because it leads from my perspective towards 54:13.080 --> 54:15.640 greater and greater degrees of intelligence. 54:15.640 --> 54:21.880 I learned the first programming language I played with in Russia was with the Turtle 54:21.880 --> 54:22.880 logo. 54:22.880 --> 54:24.840 Logo, yeah. 54:24.840 --> 54:29.960 And if you look, I just have a list of programming languages, all of which I've now played with 54:29.960 --> 54:30.960 a little bit. 54:30.960 --> 54:36.640 I mean, they're all beautiful in different ways from Fortran, Cobalt, Lisp, Algol 60, 54:36.640 --> 54:46.160 Basic, Logo again, C, as a few, the object oriented came along in the 60s, Simula, Pascal, 54:46.160 --> 54:47.560 Smalltalk. 54:47.560 --> 54:48.560 All of that leads. 54:48.560 --> 54:49.560 They're all the classics. 54:49.560 --> 54:50.560 The classics. 54:50.560 --> 54:51.560 Yeah. 54:51.560 --> 54:52.560 The classic hits, right? 54:52.560 --> 54:58.280 Steam, that's built on top of Lisp. 54:58.280 --> 55:05.900 On the database side, SQL, C++, and all of that leads up to Python, Pascal too, and that's 55:05.900 --> 55:10.960 before Python, MATLAB, these kind of different communities, different languages. 55:10.960 --> 55:13.240 So can you talk about that world? 55:13.240 --> 55:18.680 I know that sort of Python came out of ABC, which I actually never knew that language. 55:18.680 --> 55:24.400 I just, having researched this conversation, went back to ABC and it looks remarkably, 55:24.400 --> 55:31.240 it has a lot of annoying qualities, but underneath those, like all caps and so on, but underneath 55:31.240 --> 55:35.720 that, there's elements of Python that are quite, they're already there. 55:35.720 --> 55:37.540 That's where I got all the good stuff. 55:37.540 --> 55:38.540 All the good stuff. 55:38.540 --> 55:41.580 So, but in that world, you're swimming these programming languages, were you focused on 55:41.580 --> 55:48.080 just the good stuff in your specific circle, or did you have a sense of what is everyone 55:48.080 --> 55:49.080 chasing? 55:49.080 --> 55:57.000 You said that every programming language is built to scratch an itch. 55:57.000 --> 55:59.920 Were you aware of all the itches in the community? 55:59.920 --> 56:05.080 And if not, or if yes, I mean, what itch were you trying to scratch with Python? 56:05.080 --> 56:12.040 Well, I'm glad I wasn't aware of all the itches because I would probably not have been able 56:12.040 --> 56:14.040 to do anything. 56:14.040 --> 56:19.760 I mean, if you're trying to solve every problem at once, you'll solve nothing. 56:19.760 --> 56:23.880 Well, yeah, it's too overwhelming. 56:23.880 --> 56:28.360 And so I had a very, very focused problem. 56:28.360 --> 56:41.880 I wanted a programming language that sat somewhere in between shell scripting and C. And now, 56:41.880 --> 56:48.720 arguably, there is like, one is higher level, one is lower level. 56:48.720 --> 56:56.760 And Python is sort of a language of an intermediate level, although it's still pretty much at 56:56.760 --> 57:00.560 the high level end. 57:00.560 --> 57:11.200 I was thinking about much more about, I want a tool that I can use to be more productive 57:11.200 --> 57:16.640 as a programmer in a very specific environment. 57:16.640 --> 57:22.280 And I also had given myself a time budget for the development of the tool. 57:22.280 --> 57:29.340 And that was sort of about three months for both the design, like thinking through what 57:29.340 --> 57:38.900 are all the features of the language syntactically and semantically, and how do I implement the 57:38.900 --> 57:43.680 whole pipeline from parsing the source code to executing it. 57:43.680 --> 57:51.440 So I think both with the timeline and the goals, it seems like productivity was at the 57:51.440 --> 57:54.040 core of it as a goal. 57:54.040 --> 58:01.280 So like, for me in the 90s, and the first decade of the 21st century, I was always doing 58:01.280 --> 58:07.620 machine learning, AI programming for my research was always in C++. 58:07.620 --> 58:14.240 And then the other people who are a little more mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, 58:14.240 --> 58:15.240 are MATLABby. 58:15.240 --> 58:18.520 They're a little bit more MATLAB focused. 58:18.520 --> 58:21.200 Those are the world, and maybe a little bit Java too. 58:21.200 --> 58:29.160 But people who are more interested in emphasizing the object oriented nature of things. 58:29.160 --> 58:34.920 So within the last 10 years or so, especially with the oncoming of neural networks and these 58:34.920 --> 58:41.360 packages that are built on Python to interface with neural networks, I switched to Python 58:41.360 --> 58:47.120 and it's just, I've noticed a significant boost that I can't exactly, because I don't 58:47.120 --> 58:52.840 think about it, but I can't exactly put into words why I'm just much, much more productive. 58:52.840 --> 58:56.400 Just being able to get the job done much, much faster. 58:56.400 --> 59:01.880 So how do you think, whatever that qualitative difference is, I don't know if it's quantitative, 59:01.880 --> 59:07.280 it could be just a feeling, I don't know if I'm actually more productive, but how 59:07.280 --> 59:08.280 do you think about... 59:08.280 --> 59:09.280 You probably are. 59:09.280 --> 59:10.280 Yeah. 59:10.280 --> 59:11.880 Well, that's right. 59:11.880 --> 59:15.400 I think there's elements, let me just speak to one aspect that I think that was affecting 59:15.400 --> 59:26.160 my productivity is C++ was, I really enjoyed creating performant code and creating a beautiful 59:26.160 --> 59:31.000 structure where everything that, you know, this kind of going into this, especially with 59:31.000 --> 59:37.080 the newer and newer standards of templated programming of just really creating this beautiful 59:37.080 --> 59:42.000 formal structure that I found myself spending most of my time doing that as opposed to getting 59:42.000 --> 59:47.520 it, parsing a file and extracting a few keywords or whatever the task was trying to do. 59:47.520 --> 59:49.980 So what is it about Python? 59:49.980 --> 59:54.520 How do you think of productivity in general as you were designing it now, sort of through 59:54.520 --> 1:00:00.120 the decades, last three decades, what do you think it means to be a productive programmer? 1:00:00.120 --> 1:00:03.560 And how did you try to design it into the language? 1:00:03.560 --> 1:00:10.400 There are different tasks and as a programmer, it's useful to have different tools available 1:00:10.400 --> 1:00:13.940 that sort of are suitable for different tasks. 1:00:13.940 --> 1:00:25.600 So I still write C code, I still write shell code, but I write most of my things in Python. 1:00:25.600 --> 1:00:33.000 Why do I still use those other languages, because sometimes the task just demands it. 1:00:33.000 --> 1:00:39.000 And well, I would say most of the time the task actually demands a certain language because 1:00:39.000 --> 1:00:45.600 the task is not write a program that solves problem X from scratch, but it's more like 1:00:45.600 --> 1:00:56.680 fix a bug in existing program X or add a small feature to an existing large program. 1:00:56.680 --> 1:01:10.160 But even if you're not constrained in your choice of language by context like that, there 1:01:10.160 --> 1:01:21.360 is still the fact that if you write it in a certain language, then you have this balance 1:01:21.360 --> 1:01:31.840 between how long does it take you to write the code and how long does the code run? 1:01:31.840 --> 1:01:42.760 And when you're in the phase of exploring solutions, you often spend much more time 1:01:42.760 --> 1:01:50.720 writing the code than running it because every time you've run it, you see that the output 1:01:50.720 --> 1:01:58.480 is not quite what you wanted and you spend some more time coding. 1:01:58.480 --> 1:02:06.760 And a language like Python just makes that iteration much faster because there are fewer 1:02:06.760 --> 1:02:19.480 details that you have to get right before your program compiles and runs. 1:02:19.480 --> 1:02:26.400 There are libraries that do all sorts of stuff for you, so you can sort of very quickly take 1:02:26.400 --> 1:02:36.320 a bunch of existing components, put them together, and get your prototype application running. 1:02:36.320 --> 1:02:42.860 Just like when I was building electronics, I was using a breadboard most of the time, 1:02:42.860 --> 1:02:51.320 so I had this sprawl out circuit that if you shook it, it would stop working because it 1:02:51.320 --> 1:02:58.800 was not put together very well, but it functioned and all I wanted was to see that it worked 1:02:58.800 --> 1:03:05.000 and then move on to the next schematic or design or add something to it. 1:03:05.000 --> 1:03:10.500 Once you've sort of figured out, oh, this is the perfect design for my radio or light 1:03:10.500 --> 1:03:15.800 sensor or whatever, then you can say, okay, how do we design a PCB for this? 1:03:15.800 --> 1:03:19.920 How do we solder the components in a small space? 1:03:19.920 --> 1:03:32.840 How do we make it so that it is robust against, say, voltage fluctuations or mechanical disruption? 1:03:32.840 --> 1:03:37.320 I know nothing about that when it comes to designing electronics, but I know a lot about 1:03:37.320 --> 1:03:40.400 that when it comes to writing code. 1:03:40.400 --> 1:03:46.080 So the initial steps are efficient, fast, and there's not much stuff that gets in the 1:03:46.080 --> 1:03:56.680 way, but you're kind of describing, like Darwin described the evolution of species, right? 1:03:56.680 --> 1:04:00.520 You're observing of what is true about Python. 1:04:00.520 --> 1:04:07.800 Now if you take a step back, if the act of creating languages is art and you had three 1:04:07.800 --> 1:04:15.640 months to do it, initial steps, so you just specified a bunch of goals, sort of things 1:04:15.640 --> 1:04:19.400 that you observe about Python, perhaps you had those goals, but how do you create the 1:04:19.400 --> 1:04:25.600 rules, the syntactic structure, the features that result in those? 1:04:25.600 --> 1:04:29.880 So I have in the beginning and I have follow up questions about through the evolution of 1:04:29.880 --> 1:04:35.440 Python too, but in the very beginning when you were sitting there creating the lexical 1:04:35.440 --> 1:04:37.440 analyzer or whatever. 1:04:37.440 --> 1:04:47.240 Python was still a big part of it because I sort of, I said to myself, I don't want 1:04:47.240 --> 1:04:53.640 to have to design everything from scratch, I'm going to borrow features from other languages 1:04:53.640 --> 1:04:54.640 that I like. 1:04:54.640 --> 1:04:55.640 Oh, interesting. 1:04:55.640 --> 1:04:58.360 So you basically, exactly, you first observe what you like. 1:04:58.360 --> 1:05:05.240 Yeah, and so that's why if you're 17 years old and you want to sort of create a programming 1:05:05.240 --> 1:05:11.600 language, you're not going to be very successful at it because you have no experience with 1:05:11.600 --> 1:05:24.300 other languages, whereas I was in my, let's say mid 30s, I had written parsers before, 1:05:24.300 --> 1:05:30.880 so I had worked on the implementation of ABC, I had spent years debating the design of ABC 1:05:30.880 --> 1:05:37.520 with its authors, with its designers, I had nothing to do with the design, it was designed 1:05:37.520 --> 1:05:42.080 fully as it ended up being implemented when I joined the team. 1:05:42.080 --> 1:05:51.440 But so you borrow ideas and concepts and very concrete sort of local rules from different 1:05:51.440 --> 1:05:58.920 languages like the indentation and certain other syntactic features from ABC, but I chose 1:05:58.920 --> 1:06:07.960 to borrow string literals and how numbers work from C and various other things. 1:06:07.960 --> 1:06:13.800 So in then, if you take that further, so yet you've had this funny sounding, but I think 1:06:13.800 --> 1:06:21.000 surprisingly accurate and at least practical title of benevolent dictator for life for 1:06:21.000 --> 1:06:25.240 quite, you know, for the last three decades or whatever, or no, not the actual title, 1:06:25.240 --> 1:06:27.940 but functionally speaking. 1:06:27.940 --> 1:06:34.280 So you had to make decisions, design decisions. 1:06:34.280 --> 1:06:41.960 Can you maybe, let's take Python 2, so releasing Python 3 as an example. 1:06:41.960 --> 1:06:47.240 It's not backward compatible to Python 2 in ways that a lot of people know. 1:06:47.240 --> 1:06:50.640 So what was that deliberation, discussion, decision like? 1:06:50.640 --> 1:06:51.640 Yeah. 1:06:51.640 --> 1:06:54.520 What was the psychology of that experience? 1:06:54.520 --> 1:06:58.520 Do you regret any aspects of how that experience undergone that? 1:06:58.520 --> 1:07:03.040 Well, yeah, so it was a group process really. 1:07:03.040 --> 1:07:11.880 At that point, even though I was BDFL in name and certainly everybody sort of respected 1:07:11.880 --> 1:07:22.160 my position as the creator and the current sort of owner of the language design, I was 1:07:22.160 --> 1:07:26.560 looking at everyone else for feedback. 1:07:26.560 --> 1:07:35.280 Sort of Python 3.0 in some sense was sparked by other people in the community pointing 1:07:35.280 --> 1:07:46.360 out, oh, well, there are a few issues that sort of bite users over and over. 1:07:46.360 --> 1:07:48.920 Can we do something about that? 1:07:48.920 --> 1:07:56.360 And for Python 3, we took a number of those Python words as they were called at the time 1:07:56.360 --> 1:08:04.800 and we said, can we try to sort of make small changes to the language that address those 1:08:04.800 --> 1:08:06.560 words? 1:08:06.560 --> 1:08:15.360 And we had sort of in the past, we had always taken backwards compatibility very seriously. 1:08:15.360 --> 1:08:20.420 And so many Python words in earlier versions had already been resolved because they could 1:08:20.420 --> 1:08:29.740 be resolved while maintaining backwards compatibility or sort of using a very gradual path of evolution 1:08:29.740 --> 1:08:31.960 of the language in a certain area. 1:08:31.960 --> 1:08:39.760 And so we were stuck with a number of words that were widely recognized as problems, not 1:08:39.760 --> 1:08:47.680 like roadblocks, but nevertheless sort of things that some people trip over and you know that 1:08:47.680 --> 1:08:52.080 that's always the same thing that people trip over when they trip. 1:08:52.080 --> 1:08:58.480 And we could not think of a backwards compatible way of resolving those issues. 1:08:58.480 --> 1:09:01.920 But it's still an option to not resolve the issues, right? 1:09:01.920 --> 1:09:07.920 And so yes, for a long time, we had sort of resigned ourselves to, well, okay, the language 1:09:07.920 --> 1:09:13.400 is not going to be perfect in this way and that way and that way. 1:09:13.400 --> 1:09:19.440 And we sort of, certain of these, I mean, there are still plenty of things where you 1:09:19.440 --> 1:09:32.680 can say, well, that particular detail is better in Java or in R or in Visual Basic or whatever. 1:09:32.680 --> 1:09:37.960 And we're okay with that because, well, we can't easily change it. 1:09:37.960 --> 1:09:38.960 It's not too bad. 1:09:38.960 --> 1:09:47.180 We can do a little bit with user education or we can have a static analyzer or warnings 1:09:47.180 --> 1:09:49.440 in the parse or something. 1:09:49.440 --> 1:09:54.880 But there were things where we thought, well, these are really problems that are not going 1:09:54.880 --> 1:09:55.880 away. 1:09:55.880 --> 1:10:00.840 They are getting worse in the future. 1:10:00.840 --> 1:10:03.040 We should do something about that. 1:10:03.040 --> 1:10:05.640 But ultimately there is a decision to be made, right? 1:10:05.640 --> 1:10:13.320 So was that the toughest decision in the history of Python you had to make as the benevolent 1:10:13.320 --> 1:10:15.180 dictator for life? 1:10:15.180 --> 1:10:20.160 Or if not, what are there, maybe even on the smaller scale, what was the decision where 1:10:20.160 --> 1:10:22.040 you were really torn up about? 1:10:22.040 --> 1:10:25.800 Well, the toughest decision was probably to resign. 1:10:25.800 --> 1:10:28.120 All right, let's go there. 1:10:28.120 --> 1:10:29.360 Hold on a second then. 1:10:29.360 --> 1:10:33.200 Let me just, because in the interest of time too, because I have a few cool questions for 1:10:33.200 --> 1:10:38.160 you and let's touch a really important one because it was quite dramatic and beautiful 1:10:38.160 --> 1:10:40.400 in certain kinds of ways. 1:10:40.400 --> 1:10:47.320 In July this year, three months ago, you wrote, now that PEP 572 is done, I don't ever want 1:10:47.320 --> 1:10:52.680 to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions. 1:10:52.680 --> 1:10:56.240 I would like to remove myself entirely from the decision process. 1:10:56.240 --> 1:11:01.520 I'll still be there for a while as an ordinary core developer and I'll still be available 1:11:01.520 --> 1:11:05.440 to mentor people, possibly more available. 1:11:05.440 --> 1:11:11.000 But I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL, benevolent dictator 1:11:11.000 --> 1:11:12.000 for life. 1:11:12.000 --> 1:11:14.240 And you all will be on your own. 1:11:14.240 --> 1:11:19.720 First of all, it's almost Shakespearean. 1:11:19.720 --> 1:11:22.300 I'm not going to appoint a successor. 1:11:22.300 --> 1:11:24.640 So what are you all going to do? 1:11:24.640 --> 1:11:29.240 Create a democracy, anarchy, a dictatorship, a federation? 1:11:29.240 --> 1:11:34.560 So that was a very dramatic and beautiful set of statements. 1:11:34.560 --> 1:11:40.080 It's almost, it's open ended nature called the community to create a future for Python. 1:11:40.080 --> 1:11:43.280 It's just kind of a beautiful aspect to it. 1:11:43.280 --> 1:11:48.320 So what, and dramatic, you know, what was making that decision like? 1:11:48.320 --> 1:11:54.560 What was on your heart, on your mind, stepping back now a few months later? 1:11:54.560 --> 1:12:02.940 I'm glad you liked the writing because it was actually written pretty quickly. 1:12:02.940 --> 1:12:14.240 It was literally something like after months and months of going around in circles, I had 1:12:14.240 --> 1:12:26.240 finally approved PEP572, which I had a big hand in its design, although I didn't initiate 1:12:26.240 --> 1:12:27.760 it originally. 1:12:27.760 --> 1:12:36.320 I sort of gave it a bunch of nudges in a direction that would be better for the language. 1:12:36.320 --> 1:12:40.320 So sorry, just to ask, is async IO, that's the one or no? 1:12:40.320 --> 1:12:49.320 PEP572 was actually a small feature, which is assignment expressions. 1:12:49.320 --> 1:12:58.200 That had been, there was just a lot of debate where a lot of people claimed that they knew 1:12:58.200 --> 1:13:04.800 what was Pythonic and what was not Pythonic, and they knew that this was going to destroy 1:13:04.800 --> 1:13:06.080 the language. 1:13:06.080 --> 1:13:11.800 This was like a violation of Python's most fundamental design philosophy, and I thought 1:13:11.800 --> 1:13:17.200 that was all bullshit because I was in favor of it, and I would think I know something 1:13:17.200 --> 1:13:19.120 about Python's design philosophy. 1:13:19.120 --> 1:13:26.340 So I was really tired and also stressed of that thing, and literally after sort of announcing 1:13:26.340 --> 1:13:34.560 I was going to accept it, a certain Wednesday evening I had finally sent the email, it's 1:13:34.560 --> 1:13:35.560 accepted. 1:13:35.560 --> 1:13:38.920 I can just go implement it. 1:13:38.920 --> 1:13:44.120 So I went to bed feeling really relieved, that's behind me. 1:13:44.120 --> 1:13:54.320 And I wake up Thursday morning, 7 a.m., and I think, well, that was the last one that's 1:13:54.320 --> 1:14:03.880 going to be such a terrible debate, and that's the last time that I let myself be so stressed 1:14:03.880 --> 1:14:06.520 out about a pep decision. 1:14:06.520 --> 1:14:07.920 I should just resign. 1:14:07.920 --> 1:14:15.520 I've been sort of thinking about retirement for half a decade, I've been joking and sort 1:14:15.520 --> 1:14:22.460 of mentioning retirement, sort of telling the community at some point in the future 1:14:22.460 --> 1:14:29.400 I'm going to retire, don't take that FL part of my title too literally. 1:14:29.400 --> 1:14:32.080 And I thought, okay, this is it. 1:14:32.080 --> 1:14:39.200 I'm done, I had the day off, I wanted to have a good time with my wife, we were going to 1:14:39.200 --> 1:14:48.480 a little beach town nearby, and in I think maybe 15, 20 minutes I wrote that thing that 1:14:48.480 --> 1:14:51.320 you just called Shakespearean. 1:14:51.320 --> 1:15:01.560 The funny thing is I didn't even realize what a monumental decision it was, because 1:15:01.560 --> 1:15:09.200 five minutes later I read that link to my message back on Twitter, where people were 1:15:09.200 --> 1:15:15.280 already discussing on Twitter, Guido resigned as the BDFL. 1:15:15.280 --> 1:15:22.440 And I had posted it on an internal forum that I thought was only read by core developers, 1:15:22.440 --> 1:15:28.520 so I thought I would at least have one day before the news would sort of get out. 1:15:28.520 --> 1:15:36.200 The on your own aspects had also an element of quite, it was quite a powerful element 1:15:36.200 --> 1:15:43.080 of the uncertainty that lies ahead, but can you also just briefly talk about, for example 1:15:43.080 --> 1:15:49.920 I play guitar as a hobby for fun, and whenever I play people are super positive, super friendly, 1:15:49.920 --> 1:15:52.680 they're like, this is awesome, this is great. 1:15:52.680 --> 1:15:57.520 But sometimes I enter as an outside observer, I enter the programming community and there 1:15:57.520 --> 1:16:05.560 seems to sometimes be camps on whatever the topic, and the two camps, the two or plus 1:16:05.560 --> 1:16:11.700 camps, are often pretty harsh at criticizing the opposing camps. 1:16:11.700 --> 1:16:14.880 As an onlooker, I may be totally wrong on this, but what do you think of this? 1:16:14.880 --> 1:16:19.760 Yeah, holy wars are sort of a favorite activity in the programming community. 1:16:19.760 --> 1:16:22.120 And what is the psychology behind that? 1:16:22.120 --> 1:16:25.120 Is that okay for a healthy community to have? 1:16:25.120 --> 1:16:29.760 Is that a productive force ultimately for the evolution of a language? 1:16:29.760 --> 1:16:39.080 Well, if everybody is patting each other on the back and never telling the truth, it would 1:16:39.080 --> 1:16:40.840 not be a good thing. 1:16:40.840 --> 1:16:52.760 I think there is a middle ground where sort of being nasty to each other is not okay, 1:16:52.760 --> 1:17:01.760 but there is a middle ground where there is healthy ongoing criticism and feedback that 1:17:01.760 --> 1:17:04.780 is very productive. 1:17:04.780 --> 1:17:07.760 And you mean at every level you see that. 1:17:07.760 --> 1:17:17.760 I mean, someone proposes to fix a very small issue in a code base, chances are that some 1:17:17.760 --> 1:17:27.080 reviewer will sort of respond by saying, well, actually, you can do it better the other way. 1:17:27.080 --> 1:17:34.360 When it comes to deciding on the future of the Python core developer community, we now 1:17:34.360 --> 1:17:41.160 have, I think, five or six competing proposals for a constitution. 1:17:41.160 --> 1:17:48.040 So that future, do you have a fear of that future, do you have a hope for that future? 1:17:48.040 --> 1:17:51.280 I'm very confident about that future. 1:17:51.280 --> 1:17:58.920 By and large, I think that the debate has been very healthy and productive. 1:17:58.920 --> 1:18:07.680 And I actually, when I wrote that resignation email, I knew that Python was in a very good 1:18:07.680 --> 1:18:16.840 spot and that the Python core developer community, the group of 50 or 100 people who sort of 1:18:16.840 --> 1:18:24.720 write or review most of the code that goes into Python, those people get along very well 1:18:24.720 --> 1:18:27.680 most of the time. 1:18:27.680 --> 1:18:40.120 A large number of different areas of expertise are represented, different levels of experience 1:18:40.120 --> 1:18:45.440 in the Python core dev community, different levels of experience completely outside it 1:18:45.440 --> 1:18:53.040 in software development in general, large systems, small systems, embedded systems. 1:18:53.040 --> 1:19:03.880 So I felt okay resigning because I knew that the community can really take care of itself. 1:19:03.880 --> 1:19:12.360 And out of a grab bag of future feature developments, let me ask if you can comment, maybe on all 1:19:12.360 --> 1:19:19.120 very quickly, concurrent programming, parallel computing, async IO. 1:19:19.120 --> 1:19:24.880 These are things that people have expressed hope, complained about, whatever, have discussed 1:19:24.880 --> 1:19:25.880 on Reddit. 1:19:25.880 --> 1:19:32.200 Async IO, so the parallelization in general, packaging, I was totally clueless on this. 1:19:32.200 --> 1:19:38.600 I just used pip to install stuff, but apparently there's pipenv, poetry, there's these dependency 1:19:38.600 --> 1:19:41.300 packaging systems that manage dependencies and so on. 1:19:41.300 --> 1:19:45.520 They're emerging and there's a lot of confusion about what's the right thing to use. 1:19:45.520 --> 1:19:56.360 Then also functional programming, are we going to get more functional programming or not, 1:19:56.360 --> 1:19:59.040 this kind of idea. 1:19:59.040 --> 1:20:08.280 And of course the GIL connected to the parallelization, I suppose, the global interpreter lock problem. 1:20:08.280 --> 1:20:12.800 Can you just comment on whichever you want to comment on? 1:20:12.800 --> 1:20:25.440 Well, let's take the GIL and parallelization and async IO as one topic. 1:20:25.440 --> 1:20:35.820 I'm not that hopeful that Python will develop into a sort of high concurrency, high parallelism 1:20:35.820 --> 1:20:37.960 language. 1:20:37.960 --> 1:20:44.800 That's sort of the way the language is designed, the way most users use the language, the way 1:20:44.800 --> 1:20:50.280 the language is implemented, all make that a pretty unlikely future. 1:20:50.280 --> 1:20:56.040 So you think it might not even need to, really the way people use it, it might not be something 1:20:56.040 --> 1:20:58.160 that should be of great concern. 1:20:58.160 --> 1:21:05.620 I think async IO is a special case because it sort of allows overlapping IO and only 1:21:05.620 --> 1:21:18.160 IO and that is a sort of best practice of supporting very high throughput IO, many connections 1:21:18.160 --> 1:21:21.680 per second. 1:21:21.680 --> 1:21:22.780 I'm not worried about that. 1:21:22.780 --> 1:21:25.280 I think async IO will evolve. 1:21:25.280 --> 1:21:27.440 There are a couple of competing packages. 1:21:27.440 --> 1:21:36.800 We have some very smart people who are sort of pushing us to make async IO better. 1:21:36.800 --> 1:21:43.800 Parallel computing, I think that Python is not the language for that. 1:21:43.800 --> 1:21:53.560 There are ways to work around it, but you can't expect to write an algorithm in Python 1:21:53.560 --> 1:21:57.440 and have a compiler automatically parallelize that. 1:21:57.440 --> 1:22:03.520 What you can do is use a package like NumPy and there are a bunch of other very powerful 1:22:03.520 --> 1:22:12.480 packages that sort of use all the CPUs available because you tell the package, here's the data, 1:22:12.480 --> 1:22:19.040 here's the abstract operation to apply over it, go at it, and then we're back in the C++ 1:22:19.040 --> 1:22:20.040 world. 1:22:20.040 --> 1:22:24.600 Those packages are themselves implemented usually in C++. 1:22:24.600 --> 1:22:28.000 That's where TensorFlow and all these packages come in, where they parallelize across GPUs, 1:22:28.000 --> 1:22:30.480 for example, they take care of that for you. 1:22:30.480 --> 1:22:36.600 In terms of packaging, can you comment on the future of packaging in Python? 1:22:36.600 --> 1:22:42.640 Packaging has always been my least favorite topic. 1:22:42.640 --> 1:22:55.600 It's a really tough problem because the OS and the platform want to own packaging, but 1:22:55.600 --> 1:23:01.000 their packaging solution is not specific to a language. 1:23:01.000 --> 1:23:07.480 If you take Linux, there are two competing packaging solutions for Linux or for Unix 1:23:07.480 --> 1:23:15.000 in general, but they all work across all languages. 1:23:15.000 --> 1:23:24.760 Several languages like Node, JavaScript, Ruby, and Python all have their own packaging solutions 1:23:24.760 --> 1:23:29.480 that only work within the ecosystem of that language. 1:23:29.480 --> 1:23:31.920 What should you use? 1:23:31.920 --> 1:23:34.560 That is a tough problem. 1:23:34.560 --> 1:23:43.520 My own approach is I use the system packaging system to install Python, and I use the Python 1:23:43.520 --> 1:23:49.280 packaging system then to install third party Python packages. 1:23:49.280 --> 1:23:51.480 That's what most people do. 1:23:51.480 --> 1:23:56.400 Ten years ago, Python packaging was really a terrible situation. 1:23:56.400 --> 1:24:05.360 Nowadays, pip is the future, there is a separate ecosystem for numerical and scientific Python 1:24:05.360 --> 1:24:08.200 based on Anaconda. 1:24:08.200 --> 1:24:09.760 Those two can live together. 1:24:09.760 --> 1:24:13.600 I don't think there is a need for more than that. 1:24:13.600 --> 1:24:14.600 That's packaging. 1:24:14.600 --> 1:24:18.720 Well, at least for me, that's where I've been extremely happy. 1:24:18.720 --> 1:24:22.320 I didn't even know this was an issue until it was brought up. 1:24:22.320 --> 1:24:27.600 In the interest of time, let me sort of skip through a million other questions I have. 1:24:27.600 --> 1:24:32.880 So I watched the five and a half hour oral history that you've done with the Computer 1:24:32.880 --> 1:24:37.600 History Museum, and the nice thing about it, it gave this, because of the linear progression 1:24:37.600 --> 1:24:44.480 of the interview, it gave this feeling of a life, you know, a life well lived with interesting 1:24:44.480 --> 1:24:52.160 things in it, sort of a pretty, I would say a good spend of this little existence we have 1:24:52.160 --> 1:24:53.160 on Earth. 1:24:53.160 --> 1:24:59.840 So, outside of your family, looking back, what about this journey are you really proud 1:24:59.840 --> 1:25:00.840 of? 1:25:00.840 --> 1:25:07.040 Are there moments that stand out, accomplishments, ideas? 1:25:07.040 --> 1:25:14.040 Is it the creation of Python itself that stands out as a thing that you look back and say, 1:25:14.040 --> 1:25:16.480 damn, I did pretty good there? 1:25:16.480 --> 1:25:25.520 Well, I would say that Python is definitely the best thing I've ever done, and I wouldn't 1:25:25.520 --> 1:25:36.560 sort of say just the creation of Python, but the way I sort of raised Python, like a baby. 1:25:36.560 --> 1:25:42.480 I didn't just conceive a child, but I raised a child, and now I'm setting the child free 1:25:42.480 --> 1:25:50.200 in the world, and I've set up the child to sort of be able to take care of himself, and 1:25:50.200 --> 1:25:52.640 I'm very proud of that. 1:25:52.640 --> 1:25:56.740 And as the announcer of Monty Python's Flying Circus used to say, and now for something 1:25:56.740 --> 1:26:02.280 completely different, do you have a favorite Monty Python moment, or a moment in Hitchhiker's 1:26:02.280 --> 1:26:07.720 Guide, or any other literature show or movie that cracks you up when you think about it? 1:26:07.720 --> 1:26:11.320 You can always play me the dead parrot sketch. 1:26:11.320 --> 1:26:13.680 Oh, that's brilliant. 1:26:13.680 --> 1:26:14.680 That's my favorite as well. 1:26:14.680 --> 1:26:15.680 It's pushing up the daisies. 1:26:15.680 --> 1:26:20.680 Okay, Greta, thank you so much for talking with me today. 1:26:20.680 --> 1:26:44.080 Lex, this has been a great conversation.