# King's Day Speech

DevFeed: [King's Day Speech](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/king-s-day-speech-38895.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2016/04/kings-day-speech.html>)

Author: Guido van Rossum (noreply@blogger.com)

Published: 2016-04-27T17:17:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Guido van Rossum](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/guido-van-rossum.md>)

Topics: [Python](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/python.md>), [Programming language](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/programming-language.md>), [Programming](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/programming.md>)

Tags: [programming](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/programming.md>), [programming-language](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/programming-language.md>), [python](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/python.md>), [speech](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/speech.md>)

## AI overview

A personal King's Day speech recounts the speaker's early interests in electronics and mathematics, his discovery of computing, and the creation of Python. It also introduces Python as a programming language created by a community and reflects on the significance of programming languages.

## Source excerpt

Today the Netherlands celebrates King's Day. To honor this tradition, the Dutch embassy in San Francisco invited me to give a "TED talk" to an audience of Dutch and American entrepreneurs. Here's the text I read to them. Part of it is the tl;dr of my autobiography; part of it is about the significance of programming languages; part of it is about Python's big idea. Leve de koning! (Long live the king!) Python: a programming language created by a community Excuse my ramblings. I'll get to a point eventually. Let me introduce myself. I'm a nerd, a geek. I'm probably somewhere on the autism spectrum. I'm also a late bloomer. I graduated from college when I was 26. I was 45 when I got married. I'm now 60 years old, with a 14 year old son. Maybe I just have a hard time with decisions: I've lived in the US for over 20 years and I am still a permanent resident. I'm no Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. But at age 35 I created a programming language that got a bit of a following. What happened next was pretty amazing. But I'll get to that. At age 10 my parents gave me an educational electronics kit. The kit was made by Philips, and it was amazing. At first I just followed the directions and everything worked; later I figured out how to design my own circuits. My prized possessions were the kit's three (!) transistors. I took one of my first electronics models, a blinking light, to show and tell in 5th grade. It was a total dud -- nobody cared or understood its importance. I think that's one of my earliest memories of finding myself a geek: until then I had just been a quiet quick learner. In high school I developed my nerdiness further -- I hung out with a few other kids interested in electronics, and during physics class we sat in the back of the class discussing NAND gates while the rest of the class was still figuring out Ohm's law. Fortunately our physics teacher had figured us out: he employed us to build a digital timer that he used to demonstrate the law of gravity to the