A Conversation with Guido van Rossum (2003)

I found this part to be pretty interesting.

> Bill Venners: Speaking of spacecraft, would you be comfortable enough with the robustness of Python systems to fly on an airplane in which all the control software was written in Python?

> Guido van Rossum: That depends much more on the attitude of the design team that built it than on the language the team chose. There are situations where doing part of the software in Python makes much more sense than doing it in any other language, even if it must have the reliability requirements of a spacecraft or air traffic control.

> Bill Venners: Why?

> Guido van Rossum: You'll never get all the bugs out. Making the code easier to read and write, and more transparent to the team of human readers who will review the source code, may be much more valuable than the narrow-focused type checking that some other compiler offers. There have been reported anecdotes about spacecraft or aircraft crashing because of type-related software bugs, where the compilers weren't enough to save you from the problems.

My guess is that in 2003 the context of this last statement about compilers was talking about C and C++. Time should always challenge us to reevaluate our assumptions.

These days $x-lang compilers provide much more than "narrow-focused type checking" in their type systems without sacrificing read/write-ability. +1 for progress.

From the first part: "If you're looking for import foo, it will eventually find either a file foo.py or foo.so (or foo.dll on Windows)" Does anybody have a link how to import a dll with the 'import' statement?