Even at very large companies, hacks can work surprisingly well for a surprising amount of time. As much as we harp on technical debt (which includes myself), we rarely appreciate how much time can be saved by implementing the most straightforward solution so we can focus on hard things.

I'm not sure if Guido was just being amicable, but in the recent Dropbox retirement post he said, “There was a small number of really smart, really young coders who produced a lot of very clever code that only they could understand,” said van Rossum. “That is probably the right attitude to have when you're a really small startup.”