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      -- Gordon McMillan, 16 Oct 1998

To my battle-scarred mind, documentation is never more than a hint. Read it
once with disbelief suspended, and then again with full throttle skepticism.
      -- Gordon McMillan, 19 Oct 1998

    Then let the record show that I hereby formally lobby for such an
optimization! I'd lay out some arguments, except that it's already implemented
<wink>.
    well-*that*-one-went-easy-ly y'rs - tim
      -- Tim Peters, 20 Oct 1998

We did requirements and task analysis, iterative design, and user testing.
You'd almost think programming languages were an interface between people and
computers.
      -- Steven Pemberton, one of the designers of Python's direct ancestor
         ABC

Not at all, although I agree here too <wink>. It's like saying a fork is broken
just because it's not that handy for jacking up a car. That is, Guido
implemented the syntax to support default arguments, and it works great for
that purpose! Using it to fake closures is a hack, and the "hey, this is cool!"
/ "hey, this really sucks!" mixed reaction thus follows, much as pain follows a
car falling on your skull. Stick to stabbing peas, or even teensy pea-sized
closures, and a fork serves very well.
      -- Tim Peters, 31 Oct 1998

My customers consider it a marketable skill that I a) think for myself b) share
my thoughts with them.
      -- Paul Prescod, 2 Nov 1998

    Anyone else know what a Stanley #45 plane is? ... it's not what you use if
you aren't looking to produce intricate moldings. If you want to make a
tabletop flat, and bring out the natural beauty of the wood, you use a big,
long and flat bench plane. The beauty is in the wood, not the tool, the tool is
just the right one to let you see that and to let others see it too.
    And that's a very impressive kind of beauty in itself, isn't it? The kind
of beauty some say is homely--an uninteresting face, boring angles, few if any
parts, no curly flowers. It's just a tool, and not beautiful at all. But look,
that tool makes beauty. It makes it *easy* to make beautiful things, to see
deep into the the grain of whatever material you're working.
    Maybe it gets us a little closer to art.
      -- Ivan Van Laningham, 3 Nov 1998

You might think "That's illegal." That's not illegal; that's *cool*.
      -- Paul Dubois at IPC7, on recursive template definitions in C++

This supports reflection, which is the 90s way of writing self- modifying code.
      -- John Aycock at IPC7, during his parsing talk

It turns out that docstrings are the only way to associate information with
functions, which is what led you to abuse them in such a fascinating and
stomach-churning way.
      -- Jim Hugunin at IPC7, on embedding BNF parsing rules in docstrings

    "The Mayans looked on the integers as gods."
    "What did the Mayans think of integer division?"
      -- Ivan Van Laningham and an unknown audience member at IPC7

Y2K problem? The Mayans didn't have a *millennium*-2K problem!
      -- Eric S. Raymond at IPC7, on learning that the Mayan calendar takes
         28 octillion years to wrap around

"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