Steven Pemberton is a distinguished researcher in the fields of interaction, declarative programming, and web technologies, based at the Dutch national research centre CWI in Amsterdam, where Python originated.

His university tutor was Dick Grimsdale who built the world’s first transistorised computer, and who was himself a tutee of Alan Turing. After university, Pemberton – coincidentally – worked in Turing’s old department on the 5th computer in the line of computers Turing had worked on.

He co-designed the language that Python is based on, was the first user of the open internet in Europe in 1988, and has been involved with the web from its inception, co-designing several web standards, including HTML, CSS, XHTML, XForms, and RDFa.

In 2022 he received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award, and in 2023 was named an ACM Distinguished Speaker.