1993 One of the things that makes it interesting, is exactly how much Guido has managed to exploit that one implementation trick of 'namespaces'. Nevertheless in wondering why free software is so good these days it occurred to me that the propagation of free software is one gigantic artificial life evolution experiment, but the metaphor isn't perfect. Programs are thrown out into the harsh environment, and the bad ones die. The good ones adapt rapidly and become very robust in short order. The only problem with the metaphor is that the process isn't random at all.
Free software is artificial life, but better.
It must have been Tim. Ehh, the poor old man's name is Dijkstra. It was a scanned version of his handwriting. As always, I'll leave it to a volunteer to experiment with this. If Perl weren't around, I'd probably be using Python right now.