Programming

First interview from him I've read in a long time. He comes over as very down-to-earth, honest and humble. And he is not mincing words about his opinion on the AI hype.

Another thing, he confirms something I was worried about, in his comments on parallelism / Python without the Global Interpreter Lock (aka GIL): Some developments in the language serve rather the big companies, than the community and open source projects. For example, lock-less multi-threading in Python serves mostly the largest companies, while having little value for small projects.

Personally, I think this was already visible in the 2/3 transition: It would have been possible to make Python 3 backwards-compatible (as an example, SBCL added Unicode support without breaking compatibility, and in the same way Python's Numpy was a compatible drop-in replacement for the old Numeric module).

But the dominant Python users were not interested in making Python 3 backwards-compatible. Now, mega-corporations with an overkill of money, or Silicon Valley start-ups which are unlikely to survive their third year, do not need backwards-compatibility so much. On the other hand, smaller community projects and above all the scientific community need it urgently. Just as an example: The Python Wiki is a MoinMoin wiki. MoinMoin was written in Python 2, and the maintainers did so far not have the resources to port it to Python 3. That's a pity because it is the most, if not the only full-featured and easy to manage wiki software written in Python, and the situation can be seen as an example how the influence of big corporations like Google is killing the open web.