The motto: release early, release often

Five years ago, I've read a post (King's Day Speech) written by Guido van Rossum on his blog. As I've read it again recently, I would like to share with you the main key point of his post. 

People studying or working in computer science should be quite familiar with the name Guido van Rossum. In fact, he is the Dutch genius programmer behind the creation of Python programming language. Python is great and has regain a huge popularity nowadays with the rise of data science and applied artificial intelligence (machine learning, deep learning, etc.). If you are a developer or software engineer and you have never heard about Python, please stop reading this post and go sleep (hahaha 😄....). Else let's continue.

In his post, Guido points out that the success of the Python language relies on two principal points:

1. the growing up of the internet in 1990.
2. the motto: release early, release often.

By releasing early and often the python code to the community, the language core team benefit from the users experiences and feedbacks. Even if the internet was slow at that moment (year 1990), it helps them to have more members in the python community. People around the world, no matters where they live have access to the code and can give feedbacks. The feedbacks help the improvements and the growing of the language. 

This point out the sharing believe behind this language. They share their code to benefit from feedbacks. This believe helps the language to become what it becomes now: one of the most powerful and used programming languages in the world. The mind of sharing source codes and softwares are known today as open source and is popularized by the Free Software Foundation.

Back to today, Python is one of the first  programming language developed on the Internet, entirely open, by a community of volunteers and passionate programmers.  The moto release early, release often has helped the language to grow very fast. The same motto can be applied in many others fields. For example, many sub-projects in Java world also implement this motto. Furthermore in project management in general, release early the PoC (Proof of Concept) of the product can help get the first feedbacks from the clients and deliver later a product that fits the needs of the client.