Today, the Dropbox blog hosts a speech that dismisses Guido van Rossum from his role, after six and a half years at the service of the platform. He will retire. It’s not just any employee: born in 1956, he is the creator of Python. The community of developers linked to the programming language still calls him, the benevolent Dictator for Life.

Guido van Rossum: Python creator’s farewell to Dropbox

The entry into the company dates back to 2013, after about a decade from the foundation of Dropbox, when almost all of the code used was written in Python. The CEO and founder Drew Houston pays tribute to him by describing him as a collaborator who not only made his technical skills available to the group but also had a significant impact in shaping the culture of the company, guiding the implementation of the solutions implemented in the over the past few years in a far-sighted perspective.

Since 2015 it is part of the mypy project, a static type open-source checker tool useful for checking the correctness of the code written in Python, conceived by another Dropbox employee (Jukka Lehtosalo) that he himself helped bring into the group. These are his words, collected in the post that announces his retirement.

I am honored to receive all these emails from fans who say that Python is the best thing that happened to them, able to change their lives. It all started simply by being open to people’s contributions and encouraging them to help themselves.