Communications of the ACM
Q&a: Python Creator Guido Van Rossum on How He Got His Start in Programming
Guido van Rossum, creator of one of the worlds most popular programming languages, tells his story.
Credit: Guido van Rossum
How did you first become interested in computers and programming?
That’s an interesting story. It was in the mid 70s. I had never heard of computers until my last year in high school. When I went to the University of Amsterdam with a major in mathematics, there were programming classes and a mainframe computer (a Control Data Corporation Cyber-170) in the basement, and within half a year I was hooked. Within two years I was neglecting my classwork in favor of writing and debugging programs in Algol and Pascal.
I remember writing an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life in Pascal that produced output on the line printer. I used Pascal’s sets, which were mapped to the hardware’s unique 60-bit word size, and implemented very fast bitwise and/or/shift operations, which I used to implement essentially the digital circuits for adding and comparing 3-bit numbers (this only makes sense if you know the rules of that game). I knew that kind of digital logic from my former life as an electronics hobbyist (which I gave up as soon as I gained access to the mainframe 
).
How did you explore your interest in math and science while in high school? Were there people who encouraged you along the way?
In high school (actually starting in the higher grades of elementary school) I was an electronics hobbyist. I started out building little transistor radios from kits, then moved on to small digital circuits. My dream was to build my own calculator out of discrete components or very simple ICs (on the order of 4 NAND gates or perhaps 4 BCD counters per chip) and I think I had a working design but my allowance wasn’t enough to afford the vast number of ICs required. Also I’m sure my soldering skills weren’t up to scratch.
I mostly got encouragement from my physics teacher — with a few fellow nerds I built a digital counter that was hooked up to the 100 Hz signal from European AC power, which we used to precisely measure small time intervals to demonstrate Galileo’s laws of gravity to the lower graders.
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