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I know nothing about Guido outside of his work with Python but I assume he's not hurting for money at all. Nevertheless, our capitalist system does not reward people for brilliance alone; it rewards people for taking risks. Some very wealthy people are still being rewarded for the risks of their ancestors, and others have managed to keep wealth gathered in different economic systems, but that is generally how new wealth is created in our economy today.

(By definition, risk takers are collectively expected to fail more often than they succeed. There is probably some level of intelligence below which success rates drop even further, but I would be surprised to see any strong correlation between success rates and intelligence above that level.)



I don't get it. How is creating a new programming language in your spare time not a risk? You're spending valuable time creating something that is likely to fail (see the scores of niche languages no one uses).

I think what you mean by "risk" is something very specific: financial risk. If Guido had instead put time and, more importantly, money into starting a "lifestyle" startup on the side, he would have been financially rewarded if successful.


We were discussing financial success; I assumed financial risk was implicit. Investing time in the creation of a new programming language is likely to pay off in many other ways, but the potential financial rewards are very low and therefore so is the element of financial risk.

People tend to overestimate the amount of money required to start a successful business.




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