Science Quote by Guido van Rossum

Van Rossum’s warning lands with the dry understatement of someone who’s watched brilliant people set their own feet on fire for fun. “If you decide” frames language design as a temptation, not a necessity: you can do it, you might even enjoy it, but you’re volunteering for a category of pain that has already claimed plenty of hobbyists. The phrase “thousands of sort of” is doing sly work. It’s numerically vague yet emotionally exact, evoking an endless field of rakes rather than a neat checklist. He’s not gatekeeping; he’s calibrating expectations.

The subtext is pragmatic engineering culture at its most Pythonic: humility in the face of complexity, suspicion of novelty-for-novelty’s sake, and respect for the accumulated scar tissue of real-world use. “Amateur” isn’t an insult here so much as a diagnosis of missing constraints. Most people can invent syntax; far fewer can invent a coherent ecosystem: error messages that teach, semantics that don’t surprise, tooling that scales, and defaults that prevent catastrophe at 2 a.m. The “pitfalls” aren’t just technical (parsing, scoping, types). They’re social: bikeshedding, undocumented edge cases, incompatible libraries, a language that looks elegant until humans start maintaining it.

Context matters: as Python’s creator, van Rossum speaks from a career spent choosing boring consistency over cleverness, because cleverness doesn’t survive contact with millions of users. The line is an inoculation against the romantic myth of the lone language inventor, replacing it with a more adult romance: designing constraints that keep other people productive.