Nothing defines the 21st century more than the ubiquitous effects of computer programming. Almost everything we do, particularly at work, is mediated by screens displaying the results of the enormous amount of computation that we now take for granted. If you’re one of the 99.7% of the human race that are not programmers, how all of this happens is a bit of a mystery. As science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke quotably wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Of course, it isn’t magic. It is, however, both complicated and complex, with codebases of tech companies measured in millions of lines of code. When you’re reasoning about a real system you might want to build in code, you’re thinking about the complex relationships between different functions over time. Your code can be more or less complicated in how it is written and structured, but the problem you're trying to solve has an inherent complexity that can’t be reduced to something simpler.

Becoming a programmer is not just about ideas, and you won’t last long at it if you can’t deal with the laser-focused details of describing your ideas in code. “I'm a little skeptical of the claim that the systems thinking is primary there, because it's much easier to come up with an idea for a system than it is to take an idea and turn it into working code,” says Guido van Rossum, the creator and retired BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) of the Python programming language. JavaScript still owns the web, and Java runs 2.5 billion Android phones, but for general purpose programming and education, Python has become the default standard.

If anyone has made turning an idea into working code easier, for more people, it’s Van Rossum over his 30-year history with Python. And he’s done it with a self-effacing grace and an understated humor—the language is named after the surreal comedy of Monty Python, not the actual Burmese python. In its quiet way, the Python programming language has managed to make some of the complications of programming computers less difficult for our brains to manage.

To understand how Van Rossum accomplished this amazing feat, we have to go back into the history of computing to the era of mainframes and machine language. “The mainframe is a machine that costs many millions of dollars, and the combined pay of all those programmers is peanuts compared to the cost of the mainframe,” he says, explaining that cost logically prioritized machine time over human time. “But as I experienced desktop workstations and PCs, I realized that a change of mindset about cost of the programmer's time versus cost of the computer's time was overdue.” Van Rossum doesn’t think he was the first person to observe this shift, but he really capitalized on it in the design of Python.

This simple idea of giving humans priority over machines is at the core of the philosophy behind Python. Certainly the fact that it’s an interpreted language as opposed to a compiled language means that the programmer gets immediate feedback about the code they’re writing without needing to take the time to recompile it after making each change. This is very common now, but thirty years ago it was quite controversial because the conventional wisdom was that faster (for the computer) was better. Updating this belief has had a large positive impact on the productivity of programmers.