Guido van Rossum is the creator of Python, one of the major programming languages on and off the web. Recently Guido retired as Benevolent Dictator For Life (“BDFL”) of Python, a title seemingly stolen from a Monty Python skit. Details of his decision were featured in an Economist article. Guido thankfully has joined the Python Steering Council. This five-person group will give guidance to the future roadmap of the Python programming language.

Van Rossum moved from the Netherlands to the USA, in 1995. He met his wife after his move. Until July 2003 they lived in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC with their son Orlijn, who was born in 2001. They then moved to Silicon Valley where Guido worked for a variety of companies including Google in the past and currently at Dropbox (spending 50% of his time on Python!).

Anders Hejlsberg is a Microsoft Technical Fellow and the lead architect of the TypeScript open-source project. Anders has worked on programming languages and development tools for over 40 years and is the original designer of C#, Delphi, and Turbo Pascal. Anders studied Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark.

James A. Gosling, O.C., Ph.D. (born May 19, 1955, near Calgary, Alberta, Canada) is a famous software developer, best known as the father of the Java programming language.

In 1977, James Gosling received a B.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary. In 1983, he earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and his doctoral thesis was titled "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints". While working towards his doctorate, he wrote a version of emacs (gosmacs), and before joining Sun Microsystems he built a multi-processor version of Unix[1] while at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as several compilers and mail systems. Since 1984, Gosling has been with Sun Microsystems.

He is generally credited as the inventor of the Java programming language in 1991. He did the original design of Java and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. For this achievement, he was elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering. He has also made major contributions to several other software systems, such as NeWS and Gosling Emacs. He also co-wrote the "bundle" program, a utility thoroughly detailed in Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike's book, "The Unix Programming Environment".