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one-liners; and Perl confuses everything period, making each line a joyous
adventure <wink>.
      -- Tim Peters, 16 Sep 1993

I've seen Python criticized as "ugly" precisely because it *doesn't* have a
trick-based view of the world. In many ways, it's a dull language, borrowing
solid old concepts from many other languages & styles: boring syntax,
unsurprising semantics, few automatic coercions, etc etc. But that's one of the
things I like about it.
      -- Tim Peters, 16 Sep 1993

One of the things that makes it interesting, is exactly how much Guido has
managed to exploit that *one* implementation trick of 'namespaces'.
      -- Steven D. Majewski, 17 Sep 1993

Anyone familiar with Modula-3 should appreciate the difference between a
layered approach, with generic Rd/Wr types, and the Python 'C with foam
padding' approach.
      -- John Redford, 24 Nov 1993

People simply will not agree on what should and shouldn't be "an error", and
once exception-handling mechanisms are introduced to give people a choice, they
will far less agree on what to do with them.
      -- Tim Peters, 17 Dec 1993

Note that because of its semantics, 'del' *can't* be a function: "del a"
deletes 'a' from the current namespace. A function can't delete something from
the calling namespace (except when written by Steve Majewski :-).
      -- Guido van Rossum, 1 Aug 1994

    I don't know a lot about this artificial life stuff -- but I'm suspicious
of anything Newsweek gets goofy about -- and I suspect its primary use is as
another money extraction tool to be applied by ai labs to the department of
defense (and more power to 'em).
    Nevertheless in wondering why free software is so good these days it
occurred to me that the propagation of free software is one gigantic artificial
life evolution experiment, but the metaphor isn't perfect.
    Programs are thrown out into the harsh environment, and the bad ones die.
The good ones adapt rapidly and become very robust in short order.
    The only problem with the metaphor is that the process isn't random at all.
Python *chooses* to include Tk's genes; Linux decides to make itself more
suitable for symbiosis with X, etcetera.
    Free software is artificial life, but better.
      -- Aaron Watters, 29 Sep 1994

I claim complete innocence and ignorance! It must have been Tim. I wouldn't
know a Trondheim Hammer if it fell on my foot!
      -- Steve Majewski, 10 Jan 1995

(Aieee! Yet another thing on my TODO pile!)
      -- A.M. Kuchling, 10 Jan 1995

[After someone wrote "...assignment capability, a la djikstra"] Ehh, the poor
old man's name is Dijkstra. I should know, "ij" is a well known digraph in the
Dutch language. And before someone asks the obvious: his famous "P and V" names
for semaphores are derived for the Dutch words "Passeer" and "Verlaat", or
"Pass" and "Leave". And no, I haven't met him (although he did work at CWI back
in the fifties when it was called, as it should still be today, Mathematical
Centre). he currently lives in Austin, Texas I believe. (While we're at it...
does anybody remember the Dijkstra font for Macintoshes? It was a scanned
version of his handwriting. I believe Luca Cardelli scanned it -- the author of
Obliq, a somewhat Python-like distributed language built on Modula-3. I could
go on forever... :-)
      -- Guido van Rossum, 19 Jan 1995

As always, I'll leave it to a volunteer to experiment with this.
      -- Guido van Rossum, 20 Jan 1995

Non-masochists, please delete this article NOW.
      -- Aaron Watters, 20 Jan 1995

If Perl weren't around, I'd probably be using Python right now.
      -- Tom Christiansen in comp.lang.perl, 2 Jun 1995

GUI stuff is *supposed* to be hard. It builds character.
      -- Jim Ahlstrom, at one of the early Python workshops

    >VERY cool mod, Peter. I'll be curious to see GvR's reaction to your
syntax.
    Hm.
      -- Nick Seidenman and Guido van Rossum, 1 Aug 1996

Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom
and nobody can read another's code; too little and expressiveness is
endangered.
      -- Guido van Rossum, 13 Aug 1996

[On regression testing] Another approach is to renounce all worldly goods and
retreat to a primitive cabin in Montana, where you can live a life of purity,
unpolluted by technological change. But now and then you can send out little
packages....
      -- Aaron Watters

Ah, you're a recent victim of forceful evangelization. Write your own assert
module, use it, and come back in a few months to tell me whether it really
caught 90% of your bugs.
      -- Guido van Rossum, 7 Feb 1997

The larger scientific computing centers generally have a "theory" division and
a "actually uses the computer" <wink> division. The theory division generally
boasts some excellent theoreticians and designers, while the other division
generally boasts some excellent physical scientists who simply want to get
their work done. In most labs I've seen, the two divisions hate each others'
guts (or, rarely, blissfully ignore each other), & the politics is so thick you
float on it even after they embed your feet in cement blocks (hence even the
simple relief of death is denied you <wink>).
      -- Tim Peters, 25 Mar 1997

In one particular way the conflict is fundamental & eternal: the "working
scientists" generally understand the hardware du jour perfectly, and
passionately resent any attempt to prevent them from fiddling with it directly
-- while the theory folks are forever inventing new ways to hide the hardware
du jour. That two groups can both be so right and so wrong at the same time is
my seventh proof for the existence of God ...
      -- Tim Peters, 25 Mar 1997

You're going to be in a minority - you're coming to Python programming from a
language which offers you a lot more in the way of comfortable operations than
Python, instead of coming from medieval torture chambers like C or Fortran,
which offer so much less.
      -- Andrew Mullhaupt, 26 Jun 1997

t/data/python_quotes.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

"Generic identifier" -- think about it too much and your head explodes.
      -- Sean McGrath at IPC7, discussing SGML terminology

Nothing I've ever written has reached 1.0.
      -- Greg Ward at IPC7, on using small version numbers

Well, that's a little thing -- the specification.
      -- Guido van Rossum at IPC7

    "We've got a name (Module Distribution Utilities) that gives us a good
3-letter acronym to group things under: MDU."
    "<thpftbt>"
      -- Greg Ward and Jeremy Hylton at IPC7

Mailman is designed to be extensible *and* comprehensible. Without
comprehensibility, enhancement is self-limiting -- functionality may be
improved, but further enhancement gets increasingly difficult.
      -- Ken Manheimer at IPC7

"Generating Usable Installations" -- OK, you've got the GUI SIG.
      -- Barry Warsaw at IPC7, on the choice of name for a SIG to discuss
         extension building

Performance is a lot like drugs -- it doesn't do much for you, but it occupies
a lot of your time.
      -- Jeremy Hylton at IPC7, on the need for a Performance SIG

I made some slides, but they suck, so I won't bother with them.
      -- Andrew Kuchling at IPC7

    "What's Python?"
    "It's a computer programming language."
    "You mean, like DOS?"
      -- Some guy in a bar and Eric S. Raymond (who was wearing a
         conference T-shirt) at IPC7

Excellent plan! Devious minds are attracted to Python, like mimes to
unappreciative crowds.
      -- Tim Peters, 13 Nov 1998

Ha! If we had only started numbering dimensions with one, we'd already be
living in a 4-D world, and Mental Organons would be *all over the place*!
      -- Tim Peters, 13 Nov 1998

Well, during those periods when I was me, there was most assuredly only one of
me. But during some of the more intense discussions, I was not me, and while
all the rest of the attendees were also not me, it is difficult to say whether
they were the same not me that I was or wasn't at the time.
      -- Gordon McMillan, 18 Nov 1998

    If Python strays into trying to be something completely new it will fail,
like Scheme, K and Smalltalk. There are both technical and sociological reasons
for this. If you stray too far technically, you make mistakes: either you make
modelling mistakes because you don't have an underlying logical model (i.e. C++
inheritance) or you make interface mistakes because you don't understand how
your new paradigm will be used by real programmers.
    Let research languages innovate. Python integrates.
      -- Paul Prescod, 21 Nov 1998

    "I got a little mad at the way python polynomials were written -- the code
looked like its author knew neither polynomials nor Python."
    "That would be me :-)."
      -- Moshe Zadka and Guido van Rossum, 22 Nov 1998

I would recommend not wasting any more time on the naming issue. (This is a
recurring theme in my posts -- remember, I spent about 0.3 microseconds
thinking about whether "Python" would be a good name for a programming
language, and I've never regretted it.)
      -- Guido van Rossum, 25 Nov 1998

    "My course members are almost all coming from Math, and the first question
was 'why isn't it complete?' Just a matter of elegance."
    "Oh, don't worry. My background is math. This is actually good for them --
like discovering that Santa Claus doesn't really exist."
      -- Christian Tismer and Guido van Rossum, 2 Dec 1998

One of my cheap entertainments is axiomatizing characterizations of [Tim
Peters]. I think I've come up with a minimal one: the only c.l.p poster more
concerned with working non-legal code than non-working legal code.
      -- Cameron Laird, 2 Dec 1998

PYTHON = (P)rogrammers (Y)earning (T)o (H)omestead (O)ur (N)oosphere.
      -- Seen in Sean McGrath's .sig, 3 Dec 1998

I never realized it before, but having looked that over I'm certain I'd rather
have my eyes burned out by zombies with flaming dung sticks than work on a
conscientious Unicode regex engine.
      -- Tim Peters, 3 Dec 1998

"Python? Oh, I've heard of that. I have a friend at the NSA who uses it."
      -- Overhead at a meeting, quoted in c.l.p on 3 Dec 1998

I think Gordon has priority on this one, since it's clearly a consequence of
his observation that tim_one despises and deplores anything useful. Which has
greater explanatory power, since I've often noted that tim_one complains about
legal working code too! Anything that works may be useful, right? Brrrrr. Must
destroy.
      -- Tim Peters in the third person, 3 Dec 1998

"Eric has a way of explaining what we're doing and why we're doing it," says
Guido van Rossum, the inventor of a programming language called Python and a
prominent figure among open-source proponents. Van Rossum, a gawky Dutchman who
now lives in Reston, invited Raymond to address a group of Python software
developers in Houston...
      -- From the _Washington Post_, 3 Dec 1998

Subclassing with a mixin doesn't let you, for example, interfere with how an
existing attribute is accessed. The general idea here is to kidnap the object,
skin it, then waltz around in public impersonating it. All without letting the
programmer / user know he's been bamboozled.
      -- Gordon McMillan, 3 Dec 1998

    Hey, while they're all eating dinner, let's sneak in a keyword!
    emancipate variable: declare absolute freedom for one variable. It can be
whatever it wants whenever it wants in whatever form it wants in whatever
language it wants on whatever computer it wants. In the ensuing chaos it will
get nothing done, but it will give programmers stories to tell for years to
come...
      -- Mike Fletcher, 25 Dec 1998

    "Can we kill this thread? The only thing it does as far as I'm concerned is