[mwatkins]

I think Van Rossum's comments are par for the course; you have to imagine he gets asked these things a lot. Perhaps it's humour which works more in his native land? Or perhaps he just doesn't care how his answers compare with the rest. Or maybe after a lifetime of achievement at his age, he's come to appreciate that his children might be more important. Dunno.

To see how he really interacts with people you'd need to see how he deals with proposals to alter the language. The whole change process for Python is very civilized and Guido is at the core of that process. If he were a jerk, as you suppose, that wouldn't be the case at all.

In general I find the entire Python community very civilized. In fact if you were to ask me what language that gets lumped in with "scripting" is the jerkiest, I'd probably nominate Ruby!

Fanboys - mostly newbies I bet (just look at the herds of the single-language PHP newbies, mostly fanboys all) - kill all the fun for any language. Like most languages, certainly the popular ones - Python isn't immune, but the overall community is sound.

As for "overly easy", I'm not going to touch that one. I like getting the job done... which means I'd better get back to my job.