Python creator Guido van Rossum joins Dropbox

Dropbox has announced that Python creator Guido van Rossum will be joining the company. According to a tweet by van Rossum, he has already quit his job at Google and will be starting at the company behind the popular synchronisation software in January. Van Rossum says he is "leaving Google as the best of friends" in a later tweet, where he shared a link to his redecorated office.

Dropbox was built on Python from the very beginning, its founder Drew Houston says in the company's announcement, adding that the language has enabled them to quickly port clients to all major platforms. He also says that van Rossum has been "a long-time friend" of the team and that Python's design philosophy has influenced how Dropbox was designed. Houston noted: "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".

Before joining Google in 2005, van Rossum worked for BeOpen PythonLabs, Elemental Security and Digital Creations, the makers of the Python-based Zope framework and now called the Zope Corporation. He started the Python project while working at the national research centre for mathematics and computer science (CWI) in Amsterdam, and moved to the US in 1995 when he took up a position at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) in Reston, Virginia. Python 1.0 first appeared in 1994, but had publicly debuted in 1991. When he moved to CNRI, van Rossum's work moved with him, as it did when he moved on to BeOpen. The history is noted in Python's licence file, as CWI, CNRI and BeOpen all owned part of Python for a time.

(fab)