I'm ashamed to say I didn't know until TFA that Guido is the BDFL...I actually thought Linus had inspired it, though that's because he seems to be the one who most frequently causes others to invoke it.
Also kind of funny that Matz is the only creator of a recent [*and major] language that isn't in that Wiki list. Is he really that hands off of Ruby (compared to Guido and Python?)
However, he's certainly easily persuaded by reason, consensus and results and Ruby has now split into multiple competing implementations, so "dictator" has always seemed a harsh term for him to me.
I am wondering if the phrase, like so much else in the Python world, is a reference to a Monty Python sketch...
Edit:
Nevermind. Just found the answer to this question on the "Talk" page for that same wikipedia article:
“This is Guido speaking. A few months ago I found an email from 1995 in an old mailbox that I had saved since then, which was meeting notes from one of the first meetings of the Python Software Association (a precursor of the PSF). Nearly everyone present was given a jocular title, and mine was in full "First Interim benevolent Dictator for Life". Once I track this down again, can I post it on the wiki page or should I do something else first? I'm pretty sure that the titles were made up collectively there and that the term did not originate in a Monty Python skit. Most likely inventors of the term are Barry Warsaw or Ken Manheimer, who were both present at the meeting (I think) and have just thekind of mind to come up with such a term. I don't know how the term subsequently became popular -- perhaps it was used in early PSA mailings. Gvanrossum (talk) 04:21, 31 July 2008 (UTC)”
It looks like someone took the liberty to add Matz to that list since your comment, although the reference they used is just to Ruby's wikipedia page which makes no mention of him being a BDFL.
I'm a Rubyist but I find "the three top web languages of PHP, Ruby, and Python" odd. I'd suspect C# and Java (and possibly classic ASP?) are still more heavily used in webapps overall than Python or Ruby. A reasonable counterargument could be that C# and Java aren't primarily used for webapps, but then neither is Python(?)
My interpretation wasn't entirely unfair. The "for" and double "of" result in an ambiguous meaning. "top" is most commonly a superlative, similar to "best" or "most popular", as in "the three best actors". But you used it in a different sense, as in "three top actors" (though this doesn't usually work with "the" before it.)
I do see where you're coming from though and what you intended so this is mostly linguistic wankery for a good Friday night in ;-)
I think the implication is that Rasmus used to work for WePay, a YC company (i.e., that's what makes it 3/3). Etsy, Rasmus's current employer, didn't go through YC.
I'm sick of Google being hailed as a magical place you'd have to be crazy to leave. Look: Google sucks. All technology companies suck, albeit in different ways. It's possible for a talented, rational person to hate working at Google, and I don't care for all the Googlers on HN saying otherwise.
The practice started with "Testing on the Toilet", which was a way to educate developers about unit-testing best practices. (This was back in 2005 or 2006, when Google very much had a cowboy-coding culture and a lot of products were just thrown over the wall for users to perpetually beta-test.) Then we got "Learning on the Loo", which is general life-hacking tips that started in 2010. I forget the official title of the Go series, but a friend and I were joking that it should be called "Going to the bathroom."
I'm ashamed to say I didn't know until TFA that Guido is the BDFL...I actually thought Linus had inspired it, though that's because he seems to be the one who most frequently causes others to invoke it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_Dictator_for_Life
Also kind of funny that Matz is the only creator of a recent [*and major] language that isn't in that Wiki list. Is he really that hands off of Ruby (compared to Guido and Python?)