Guido van Rossum: Python and the Future of Programming | Lex Fridman Podcast #341
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it for Guido's own views on the GIL, Python internals and using Copilot, especially in Python-related threads.
What it is
A roughly three-hour Lex Fridman podcast conversation with Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python. Topics include Python's design, the GIL, asyncio, the future of programming and AI coding tools.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2022 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends pen2l · 2022-12 · on “Python 3.11 Delivers”
This is baseless conjecture and completely without merit. Guido was intimately involved with this speed-up work. I've disagreed with Guido over things but the things you're saying are just weird. I recommend this interview to get a slightly better glimpse of the guy: [this video]
Recommends fernandotakai · 2023-07 · on “Commander Keen's Adaptive Tile Scrolling”
link for people that want to watch it: [LINK] i would also recommend another two of his interviews: Todd Howard [LINK] Guido van Rossun [this video]
Cites frfl · 2023-07 · on “The Python Steering Council intent to approve PEP 703: making the GIL optional”
If I remember Guido van Rossum did mention the status of the GIL in one of the Lex Friedman episodes [1] he was on (it's been a while, so I may be misremembering). Surprised to see a big decision like this happen so quickly. Did Meta's announcement play a big role in this [2]? [1]: [this video] [2]: [LINK]
Cites mobiuscog · 2023-12 · on “How Many Lines of C It Takes to Execute a and B in Python?”
There was some high-level discussion of this in the chat Guido van Rossum had with Lex Fridman (timestamped): [this video]
Cites vonneumannstan · 2025-02 · on “The Generative AI Con”
Yeah unironically. Guido van Rossum - "I use it every day. My biggest adjustment with using Copilot was that instead of writing code, my posture shifted to reviewing code." [this video] Here's Jeff Dean saying 25% of the characters in new PRs at Google are AI Generated. [LINK] Andrej Karpathy - "I basically can't imagine going back to "unassisted" coding at this point" [LINK] Andrew Ng - "I run multiple models on my laptop — Mistral, Llama, Zefa. And I use ChatGPT quite often. " [LINK] Simon Willison [LINK] I mean I can keep going. I doubt you would compare yourself to these people.