The fathers of programming languages ​​are too boring to retire, and they choose to return to the workplace

Organize | Yu Xuan

Produced | Program Life (ID: coder_life)

For migrant workers, being able to retire early is definitely the ultimate dream. But what is surprising is that many programming giants already have wealth and fame, but they are still struggling to work at the age of retirement.

Among them, there is no lack of people who have retired, but feel too bored and choose to re-employ.

Father of Python: Guido van Rossum

Guido van Rossum was born in the Netherlands on January 31, 1956, and obtained a master’s degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Amsterdam in 1982. In 1989, he created the easy-to-learn programming language Python. Guido van Rossum joined Google in 2005 and left Google in 2013 to work at Dropbox.

Since the official launch of Python, Guido van Rossum has been personally maintaining the Python community, and he will personally sign and confirm every Python Improvement Proposal (PEP), so he is called “the benevolent dictator for life”.

But in July 2018, Guido van Rossum suddenly announced that he would withdraw from the core Python decision-making level and turn to the background. Talking about the reasons for his abdication, Guido van Rossum revealed in an interview that because many people were dissatisfied with his decision-making, and even many comments that slandered him came from the core members of Python, this situation made him very cold. At the same time, he also said that he has been thinking of retirement for nearly ten years.

Just over a year later, in October 2019, Guido van Rossum, 63, announced his retirement. Surprisingly, in November 2020, Guido van Rossum, who had not retired long ago, tweeted that he had returned to the workplace and joined the Microsoft developer department. As for the reason for choosing to re-employ, Guido van Rossum said that retirement is too boring, and in the future, on the platform that Microsoft embraces open source, he will be committed to “making Python more useful”.

Father of C: Ken Thompson

Ken Thompson was born in New Orleans, United States in 1943. In 1960, he was admitted to the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in electrical engineering, and received a master’s degree in electrical engineering. In 1966, after graduation, Ken Thompson joined Bell Labs.

At Bell Labs, Ken Thompson met Dennis Ritchie, and in their collaborative career, the two co-invented the Unix operating system and the C language, and are also jointly known as “the father of Unix” and “the father of the C language”. It is worth mentioning that the predecessor of the C language, the B language, was developed by Ken Thompson.

Ken Thompson spent his entire career at Bell Labs until 2000, when he announced his retirement at the age of 57. After retiring, Ken Thompson began to develop another hobby of his own – flying, for which he also took a pilot’s license and became a full-time pilot.

Maybe it was fun, and in 2006, Ken Thompson, who couldn’t be idle, chose to join Google. During his tenure at Google, he and other scientists developed the Go language.

Father of C++: Bjarne Stroustrup

Born in Denmark in 1950, Bjarne Stroustrup received a PhD in Computer Science from Cambridge University in 1979 and a job offer at Bell Labs after graduation.

In the same year, in order to make work more efficient, Bjarne Stroustrup started the development of C++ based on the C language. After the official launch of C++ in 1985, it quickly became one of the most popular languages ​​in the 1990s because of its object-oriented ideas and the high-efficiency features of the C language.

From 2002 to 2014, Bjarne Stroustrup was a professor in the School of Computer Science at Texas A&M University. A long teaching career makes Bjarne Stroustrup feel too alienated from real problems. Therefore, in 2014, he started a cross-border financial career and joined Morgan Stanley as a technical researcher and managing director of the technology department, focusing on solving technical problems. At the same time, he is also a visiting professor in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University.

Now 72 years old, he has no plans to retire, and is still studying technological innovation and actively participating in C++ development.

What will you do after retirement?

In order to make life more fulfilling, foreign tech giants still choose to continue working at the age when they should retire. As for the planning and prospect of retirement life, well-known domestic programmers and technical bigwigs also have their own ideas.

At the 1024 Programmer Conference held by CSDN in 2020, Jiang Tao, the founder of CSDN, had a conversation with Qiu Bojun, who is known as “China’s No. 1 Programmer”. He is also the founder of Kingsoft Software and the father of WPS. At that time, he had just retired not long ago. When talking about his life after retirement, Qiu Bojun said that he usually pays attention to some things of interest, such as playing games, writing plug-ins and so on.

In “New Programmer 001: The Golden Decade of Developers” , CSDN founder Jiang Tao had an exclusive conversation with Wang Chenglu, then president of Huawei’s consumer business software department and known as the “father of Hongmeng”, when he mentioned “if you retire in the future” Now, what are your thoughts?” When asked, Wang Chenglu said, “If I retire, I would like to be an evangelist and let HarmonyOS take root. Because HarmonyOS is successful, it will fundamentally change the underlying structure of the information industry. In addition, there is one thing I really want to do – to teach.”

After reading the retirement life and prospects of these big guys above, what are your thoughts on your retirement life? Welcome to leave a message~

The text and pictures in this article are from CSDN