ACME-QuoteDB
view release on metacpan or search on metacpan
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
list.]
Just a success note for Guido and the list: Python 0.9.9, stdwin, readline,
gmp, and md5 all go up on linux 0.99 pl11 without much problems.
-- Allan Bailey, 2 Aug 1993 [First mention of Linux on python-list.]
Rule: "You shouldn't have to open up a black box and take it apart to find out
you've been pushing the wrong buttons!" Corollary: "Every black box should have
at least TWO blinking lights: "Paper Jam" and "Service Required" (or
equivalent)."
-- Steven D. Majewski, 9 Sep 1993
We've been through a couple of syntax changes, but I have sort of assumed that
by the time we get to version 1.0 release, the language, (if not the
implementation) will essentially be stable.
-- Steven D. Majewski, 14 Sep 1993
"Python tricks" is a tough one, cuz the language is so clean. E.g., C makes an
art of confusing pointers with arrays and strings, which leads to lotsa neat
pointer tricks; APL mistakes everything for an array, leading to neat
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
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
When I originally designed Perl 5's OO, I thought about a lot of this stuff,
and chose the explicit object model of Python as being the least confusing. So
far I haven't seen a good reason to change my mind on that.
-- Larry Wall, 27 Feb 1997 on perl5-porters
PSA 1996 Budget
---------------
Income:
$1,093,276.54 'Guido for President'
Campaign Contributions(1)
$ 3.12 Milk Money Extortion Program
$ 2,934.07 PSA Memberships
-------------
$1,096,213.73 Total Income
Expenses:
$ 652,362.55 Monty Python Licencing Fees (2)
$ 10,876.45 Pre-Release 2 Week Vacations (3)
$ 369,841.59 Post-Release 2 Week Vacations (3)
$ 15.01 Alien Abduction Insurance
$ 62,541.72 Python Web Site Maintenance
$ 554.65 Great Comfort Cream
-------------
$1,096,191.97 Total Expenses
$ (21.76) Total Profit (Loss)
Notes:
(1) Many of you many not be aware of the fabulously successful 'Guido for
President' Campaign. While Guido has no interest in being the president, the
PSA thought it would be a cool way to collect money. The centerpiece of the
campaign featured an attractive offer to spend the night in Guido's spare
bedroom in exchange for a $50,000.00 contribution. (Mark Lutz stayed TWICE!)
(2) Since the proliferation of Monty Python related names (Python, Monty,
Grail, Eric-the-Half-a-Compiler, et al.) has increased over the past year, the
PSA felt it would be wise to licencing the Python name to forestall any
lawsuits. An added benefit is that John Cleese is teaching Guido how to walk
funny.
(3) Pre-Release vacations are spent in the Catskills. Post-Release
vacations are spent in the Bahamas. Guido is currently working on a system
which will allow him to make more releases of Python; thus octupling the number
of vacations he takes in a year.
-- Matthew Lewis Carroll Smith, 4 Apr 1997
I mean, just take a look at Joe Strout's brilliant little "python for
beginners" page. Replace all print-statements with sys.stdout.write(
string.join(map(str, args)) + "\n") and you surely won't get any new beginners.
And That Would Be A Very Bad Thing.
-- Fredrik Lundh, 27 Aug 1996
Ya, ya, ya, except ... if I were built out of KSR chips, I'd be running at 25
or 50 MHz, and would be wrong about ALMOST EVERYTHING almost ALL THE TIME just
due to being a computer! Think about it -- when's the last time you spent 20
hours straight debugging your son/wife/friend/neighbor/dog/ferret/snake? And
they *still* fell over anyway? Except in a direction you've never seen before
each time you try it? The easiest way to tell you're dealing with a computer is
when the other side keeps making the same moronic misteakes over and misteakes
over and misteakes over and misteakes over and misteakes over and misteakes
CTRL-C again.
-- Tim Peters, 30 Apr 1997
BTW, a member of the ANSI C committee once told me that the only thing rand is
used for in C code is to decide whether to pick up the axe or throw the dwarf,
and if that's true I guess "the typical libc rand" is adequate for all but the
most fanatic of gamers <wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 21 June 1997.
Things in Python are very clear, but are harder to find than the secrets of
wizards. Things in Perl are easy to find, but look like arcane spells to invoke
magic.
-- Mike Meyer, 6 Nov 1997
Indeed, as Palin has come to understand, being part of Python means never
really knowing what may lurk around the corner.
"We've never really followed any rules at all with Python," he said. "We're
a spontaneous lot. It's more fun that way."
-- Michael Palin, quoted from a Reuters/Variety news item titled
"Rare Python Reunion", Jan 15 1998.
Python is an excellent language for learning object orientation. (It also
happens to be my favorite OO scripting language.)
-- Sriram Srinivasan, _Advanced Perl Programming_
The point is that newbies almost always read more into the semantics of release
than are specified, so it's worthwile to be explicit about how little is being
said <wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 12 Feb 1998
Ah! "Never mind" to a bunch of what I said before (this editor can't move
backwards <wink>).
-- Tim Peters, 12 Feb 1998
After 1.5 years of Python, I'm still discovering richness (and still unable to
understand what the hell Jim Fulton is talking about).
-- Gordon McMillan, 13 Mar 1998
Tabs are good, spaces are bad and mixing the two just means that your motives
are confused and that you don't use enough functions.
-- John J. Lehmann, 19 Mar 1998
... but whenever optimization comes up, people get sucked into debates about
exciting but elaborate schemes not a one of which ever gets implemented; better
to get an easy 2% today than dream about 100% forever.
-- Tim Peters, 22 Mar 1998
I've been playing spoilsport in an attempt to get tabnanny.py working, but now
that there's absolutely no reason to continue with this, the amount of my life
I'm willing to devote to it is unbounded <0.9 wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 30 Mar 1998
Python is a little weak in forcing encapsulation. It isn't made for bondage and
domination environments.
-- Paul Prescod, 30 Mar 1998
One of my first big programming assignments as a student of computer science
was a source formatter for Pascal. The assignment was designed to show us the
real-life difficulties of group programming projects. It succeeded perhaps too
well. For a long time, I was convinced that source code formatters were a total
waste of time, and decided to write beautiful code that no automatic formatter
could improve upon. In fact, I would intentionally write code that formatters
could only make worse.
-- Guido van Rossum, 31 Mar 1998
You need to build a system that is futureproof; it's no good just making a
modular system. You need to realize that your system is just going to be a
module in some bigger system to come, and so you have to be part of something
else, and it's a bit of a way of life.
-- Tim Berners-Lee, at the WWW7 conference
From gotos to the evolution of life in 10 posts; that's comp.lang.python for
you!
-- A.M. Kuchling, 4 Apr 1998
This is *Python*! If we didn't care what code looked like, most of us would
probably be hacking in some version of Lisp -- which already covered most of
Python's abstract *semantics* way back when Guido was just a wee snakelet
frolicking in the lush Amsterdam jungle.
-- Tim Peters, 24 Apr 1998
The infinities aren't contagious except in that they often appear that way due
to their large size.
-- Tim Peters on the IEEE 754 floating point standard, 27 Apr 1998
The "of course, while *I* have no problem with this at all, it's surely too
much for a lesser being" flavor of argument always rings hollow to me. Are you
personally confused by the meanings for "+" that exist today? *Objecting* to
the variations is a different story; I'm wondering whether you personally
stumble over them in practice. I don't; Steven doesn't; I doubt that you do
either. I'm betting that almost *nobody* ever does, in which case those "less
nimble colleagues and students" must be supernaturally feeble to merit such
concern.
-- Tim Peters, 29 Apr 1998
"Ideally, IMO, two messages with the same name should have the same meaning
but possibly different implementations. Of course, "meaning" is somewhat
relative, but the notion that two messages with the same name should have the
same 'meaning' is very useful."
"Like clothes.launder() vs money.launder(), or shape.draw() vs
blood.draw(), or matrix.norm() vs hi.norm() <wink>? I'm afraid English thrives
on puns, and the same word routinely means radically different things across
application areas. Therefore, to insist that a word have "one true meaning" in
a programming language is insisting that the language cater to one true
application domain."
-- Jim Fulton and Tim Peters, in a discussion of rich comparisons, 29
Apr 1998
Indeed, when I design *my* killer language, the identifiers "foo" and "bar"
will be reserved words, never used, and not even mentioned in the reference
manual. Any program using one will simply dump core without comment. Multitudes
will rejoice.
-- Tim Peters, 29 Apr 1998
Too little freedom makes life confusingly clumsy; too much, clumsily confusing.
Luckily, the tension between freedom and restraint eventually gets severed by
Guido's Razor.
-- Tim Peters, 29 Apr 1998
In other words, I'm willing to see dark corners added to the language, as long
as I don't have to go into them myself.
-- A.M. Kuchling, 29 Apr 1998
This argument is specious. What on earth would it mean to compare an object you
created with another object from someone else's code unless you knew exactly
what each object's semantics were? Do you really want to ask if my abstract
syntax tree is less then your HTTP connection object?
-- Jeremy Hylton, in a discussion of rich comparisons, 29 Apr 1998
Two things I learned for sure during a particularly intense acid trip in my own
lost youth: (1) everything is a trivial special case of something else; and,
(2) death is a bunch of blue spheres.
-- Tim Peters, 1 May 1998
Well, they will be: "<" will mean what everyone thinks it means when applied to
builtin types, and will mean whatever __lt__ makes it mean otherwise, except
when __lt__ isn't defined but __cmp__ is in which case it will mean whatever
__cmp__ makes it mean, except when neither __lt__ or __cmp__ are defined in
which case it's still unsettled. I think. Or isn't that what you meant by
"clearly defined"?
-- Tim Peters, 6 May 1998
You write a great program, regardless of language, by redoing it over & over &
over & over, until your fingers bleed and your soul is drained. But if you tell
newbies *that*, they might decide to go off and do something sensible, like
bomb defusing<wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 5 Jun 1998
OO styles help in part because they make it easier to redo large parts over,
or, when the moon is shining just right, to steal large parts from someone
else. Python helps in many additional ways regardless of style, not least of
which in that it hurts less to throw away 50 lines of code than 5,000 <0.5
wink>. The pains, and joys, of programming are *qualitatively* the same under
Python. There's less pain less often, and joy comes quicker. And that's worth a
whole lot.
-- Tim Peters, 5 Jun 1998
I've had a DBA tell me that what I wanted to do "could not" be done because his
silly $5000 tool couldn't model it. Proving him wrong simply increased his
conviction that what I was doing was immoral and perverse. Which, come to think
of it, it probably was. Hee hee.
-- Gordon McMillan, 8 Jun 1998
The majority of programmers aren't really looking for flexibility. Most
languages that enjoy huge success seem to do so not because they're flexible,
but because they do one particular thing *extremely* well. Like Fortran for
fast number-crunching in its day, or Perl for regexps, or C++ for compatibility
with C, or C for ... well, C's the exception that proves the rule.
-- Tim Peters, 11 Jun 1998
It has also been referred to as the "Don Beaudry *hack*," but that's a
misnomer. There's nothing hackish about it -- in fact, it is rather elegant and
deep, even though there's something dark to it.
-- Guido van Rossum, _Metaclass Programming in Python 1.5_
Just point your web browser at http://www.python.org/search/ and look for
"program", "doesn't", "work", or "my". Whenever you find someone else whose
program didn't work, don't do what they did. Repeat as needed.
-- Tim Peters, on python-help, 16 Jun 1998
Now some people see unchecked raw power and flee from perceived danger, while
others rush toward perceived opportunity. That's up to them. But I think it's
enormously *clarifying* in either case to see just *how* raw this particular
gimmick can get.
-- Tim Peters, 16 Jun 1998
Every language has its partisans, usually among folks deeply immersed in their
particular theology, triumphant in having divined the inner meaning of some
esoteric operations, like a medieval Jesuit hot on the trail of the final
ontological proof, whose conciseness in solving a single problem makes them
almost swoon with ecstacy at the expected savings of many keystrokes, as if
those very keystrokes represented a lot of heavy lifting and hauling on their
part.
-- John Holmgren, 18 Jun 1998
> In general, the situation sucks.
mind-if-i-use-that-as-my-epitaph<wink>?-ly y'rs - tim
-- Timothy J. Grant and Tim Peters, 22 Jun 1998
> Just for the record, on AIX, the following C program:
Oh no you don't! I followed AIX threads for the first year it came out, but
eventually decided there was no future in investing time in baffling
discussions that usually ended with "oh, never mind -- turns out it's a bug"
<0.9 wink>.
-- Vladimir Marangozov and Tim Peters, 23 Jun 1998
Python - why settle for snake oil when you can have the *whole* snake?
-- Mark Jackson, 26 Jun 1998
The problem I have with "SETL sets" in Python is the same I have with every
other language's "killer core" in Python: SETL is much more than just "a set
type", Eiffel is much more than just fancy pre- and post- conditions, Perl's
approach to regexps is much more than just its isolated regexp syntax, Scheme
is much more than just first-class functions & lexical closures, and so on.
Good languages aren't random collections of interchangeable features: they have
a philosophy and internal coherence that's never profitably confused with their
surface features.
-- Tim Peters, 10 Jul 1998
"Since I'm so close to the pickle module, I just look at the pickles
directly, as I'm pretty good at reading pickles."
"As you all can imagine, this trick goes over really well at parties."
-- Jim Fulton and Paul Everitt on the Bobo list, 17 Jul 1998
My theory is that the churning of old threads and reminiscences (Continuations,
Icon influences, old-T-shirts, the pre news-group mailing list archive,
whitespace, closures, .... ) has brought some old messages to the surface, via
some mechanism similar to the way plankton and other nutrients are cycled in
the ocean.
-- Steven D. Majewski, 23 Jul 1998
In general, Our Guido flees from schemes that merely change *which* foot gets
blown off <0.45 caliber wink>. Schemes that remove the firing pin entirely have
a much better, um, shot <wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 25 Jul 1998
I don't know what "invert the control structure" means -- but if it's anything
like turning a hamster inside-out, I would *expect* it to be messy <wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 25 Jul 1998
This makes it possible to pass complex object hierarchies to a C coder who
thinks computer science has made no worthwhile advancements since the invention
of the pointer.
-- Gordon McMillan, 30 Jul 1998
The nice thing about list comprehensions is that their most useful forms could
be implemented directly as light sugar for ordinary Python loops, leaving
lambdas out of it entirely. You end up with a subtly different beast, but so
far it appears to be a beast that's compatible with cuddly pythons.
-- Tim Peters, 6 Aug 1998
I wonder what Guido thinks he might do in Python2 (assuming, of course, that he
doesn't hire a bus to run over him before then <wink>).
-- Tim Peters, 26 Aug 1998
After writing CGI scripts the traditional way for a few years, it is taking
awhile to reshape my thinking. No sledgehammer to the head yet, but lots of
small sculpting hammers...
-- John Eikenberry on the Bobo list, 27 Aug 1998
I believe sometimes numbers creep into my programs as strings, so '4'/2 needs
to also be 2. Other languages do this. Since this is due in part to user input,
I guess 'four'/2, 'quattro/2', 'iv/2' etc. need to be 2 as well; don't know any
other language that does so, but Python could take the lead here in software
reliability. Any white space should be ignored, including between my ears. I
don't have time to write any useful software, so I've decided to devote myself
to proposing various changes to the Python interpreter.
-- Donn Cave uses sarcasm with devastating effect, 28 Aug 1998
then-again-if-history-were-important-god-wouldn't-have-hid- it-in-the- past-ly
y'rs
-- Tim Peters, 28 Aug 1998
> >( float ( / 1 3 ))
> 0.33333333333333331
Now *that* one is impressive: it's the best possible 17-digit decimal
representation of the best possible 53-bit fp binary representation of 1/3, and
17 is the minimum number of decimal digits you need in general so that a 53-bit
binary fp value can be exactly reconstructed by a best-possible atof.
-- Tim Peters, 2 Sep 1998
This is not a technical issue so much as a human issue; we are limited and so
is our time. (Is this a bug or a feature of time? Careful; trick question!)
-- Fred Drake on the Documentation SIG, 9 Sep 1998
There are also some surprises [in the late Miocene Australia] some small
mammals totally unknown and not obviously related to any known marsupial
(appropriately awarded names such as _Thingodonta_ and _Weirdodonta_) and a
giant python immortalized as _Montypythonoides_.
-- _The Book of Life_, found by Aaron Watters
Can the denizens of this group enlighten me about what the advantages of
Python are, versus Perl ?
"python" is more likely to pass unharmed through your spelling checker than
"perl".
-- An unknown poster and Fredrik Lundh, 11 Sep 1998
I have to say that the Dragon book is good when you consider the alternatives,
but compared with the Platonic ideal it leaves much to be desired. In
particular the algorithm descriptions are described at such a low level it's
difficult to understand how they work -- and at a higher conceptual level
involving graph theoretical transforms of automata (which I got thanks to Jean
Gallier by word of mouth and effort of chalk) is nearly invisible for the
trees.
-- Aaron Watters, 17 Sep 1998
... and at a higher conceptual level involving graph theoretical transforms of
automata (which I got thanks to Jean Gallier by word of mouth and effort of
chalk) ...
-- Aaron Watters, 17 Sep 1998
Every clarity vanished? :-)
-- Christian Tismer after answering a poster's question, 17 Sep 1998
Take the "public" modifier off Joseph's interface, or leave it there but
nest the interface inside class "closure", or even move the interface to its
own printer.java file, and it compiles and runs without incident. Most of the
big boys I hang with aren't paralyzed by self-explanatory compiler msgs <wink>.
not-to-mention-the-girls-ly y'rs
-- Tim Peters, 24 Sep 1998
<shakes head ruefully> You kids today, with your piercings and your big pants
and your purple-and-green hair and your X-Files and your Paula Cole and your
espresso coffee and your Seattle grunge rock and your virtual machines and your
acid-washed jeans and your Ernest Hemingway and your object-oriented languages
and your fax machines and your hula hoops and your zoot suits and your strange
slang phrases like "That's so bogus" or "What a shocking bad hat" and those
atonal composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Milton Babbit that you kids seem to
like these days and your cubist painters and your Ally McBeal and that guy in
Titanic and your TCP/IP protocol and your heads filled with all that Cartesian
dualism these days and ... well, I just don't get you kids. <shakes head
ruefully again>
-- A.M. Kuchling, 1 Oct 1998
E.g., at the REBOL prompt I typed
send tim@email.msn.com "Did this work?"
and in response it dialed my modem, connected to my ISP, and then REBOL
crashed after provoking an invalid page fault in kernel32.dll. Then my
connection broke, and the modem dialed and connected again. Then it just sat
there until it timed out.
now-*that's*-user-friendly<wink>-ly y'rs
-- Tim Peters, 24 Sep 1998
I've reinvented the idea of variables and types as in a programming language,
something I do on every project.
-- Greg Ward, September 1998
"The event/tree dualism reminds me why I always wanted to be able to do
pattern matching on trees."
"'Honey, what is this guy doing up there?' 'Oh, I suppose it's Christian,
trying to match some patterns.' "
-- Christian Tismer and Dirk Heise, 12 Oct 1998
Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.
-- Larry Wall, 14 Oct 1998
"What's the opinion of the (wink) Python luminaries?"
"The last time I saw a position paper from them, they came out strongly
against the suggestion that old people be put on ice floes and left to drift
out to sea to die.
they-never-like-*any*-of-my-ideas-ly y'rs"
-- Stuart Hungerford and Tim Peters, 14 Oct 1998
Rather than borrowing from our beauty-impaired ugly sibling, why not look at
Java, the beautiful, conceited sister? We could have something more like
JavaDoc.
-- Paul Prescod, 18 Oct 1998
It won't work. This is far too concrete a problem to interest Tim. I see 3
possible approaches:
1) Claim that Python can't do a <some random combination of 'L', 'R', 'A'>
grammar. This will yield an irate response from Aaron which will draw Tim into
it and you'll get a solution in 3 months after lots of entertaining posts.
2) Turn it into an optimization problem and get a solution from Marc- Andre
using mxTextTools next week.
3) Turn it into an obfuscation problem and get competing solutions from
Greg Stein and Fredrik tomorrow morning.
if-anybody's-found-don-beaudry's-sucker-button-let-me-know ly 'yrs
-- 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
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
features. C++ has features. Python doesn't have a stellar score on my
elegance-o-meter, but for me its major win is the lack of features, and lack of
ambiguities. It fits in my brain.
-- Quinn Dunkan, 18 Nov 2000
When explaining programming I sometimes compare programmers to photographers:
amateur photographers talk about cameras and lenses and gadgets. They know how
to make their camera do almost anything, and they are keen to argue the merits
of their favorite tools. Professional photographers talk about contrast and
lighting and composition. The camera is almost irrelevant. Ansel Adams used
cameras that were less sophisticated than a supermarket disposable, back when
photography was slow and tedious (like batch-oriented programming). Because the
technology was so primitive, he carefully planned his photographs and developed
discipline so he could reliably make excellent photographs over and over.
-- Greg Jorgensen, 26 Nov 2000
As you might have guessed, I didn't do this just for fun. It is the old game of
explaining what is there, convincing everybody that you at least know what you
are talking about, and then three days later coming up with an improved
application of the theory.
-- Christian Tismer, 11 Dec 2000
Have they sprouted a new timbot, more geared towards newbies, more polite and
friendly maybe, with a touch of human fallibility (hence the occasional slip of
the keyboard) and named it Alex?
-- Carel Fellinger, 12 Dec 2000
I'm spending most of my waking hours understanding this patch -- it is a true
piece of wizardry.
-- GvR, discussing a patch from Neil Schemenauer, 13 Dec 2000
Maybe they took solidity *for granted*, because, in their (Renaissance)
times and in their (Architecture) calling, compromises regarding solidity were
simply unthinkable. Well, we're not so lucky, in the software field, today; the
Firmitas of *by far* most software around is imperfect.
We *must* live by "do the simplest thing that can possibly work" -- give
solidity its proper, foremost place. One of the debilitating factors for much
current software is a misplaced emphasis on assumed 'convenience' (funky GUIs,
quirky shortcuts, special cases aplenty) to the detriment of solidity. A small
but crucial step to reverse this trend, is to start by putting the order right
once more... the way Vitruvius had it!
-- Alex Martelli, 13 Dec 2000
The Martellibot Mark 1 has a completely European flavour to it, and adds a
cosmopolitan touch of linguistics to its output, sprinkling foreign language
references in. It is similar to the timbot in its overall erudition, but can be
distinguished from it by its tendency to indulge in flamewars (which, I
believe, it does mostly to convince us it is human).
-- Steve Holden, 13 Dec 2000
In keeping with the religious nature of the battle-- and religion offers
precise terms for degrees of damnation! --I suggest:
struggling -- a supported feature; the initial state of all features; may
transition to Anathematized
anathematized -- this feature is now cursed, but is supported; may
transition to Condemned or Struggling; intimacy with Anathematized features is
perilous
condemned -- a feature scheduled for crucifixion; may transition to
Crucified, Anathematized (this transition is called "a pardon"), or Struggling
(this transition is called "a miracle"); intimacy with Condemned features is
suicidal
crucified -- a feature that is no longer supported; may transition to
Resurrected
resurrected -- a once-Crucified feature that is again supported; may
transition to Condemned, Anathematized or Struggling; although since
Resurrection is a state of grace, there may be no point in human time at which
a feature is identifiably Resurrected (i.e., it may *appear*, to the
unenlightened, that a feature moved directly from Crucified to Anathematized or
Struggling or Condemned -- although saying so out loud is heresy).
-- Tim Peters, 18 Dec 2000
my-python-code-runs-5x-faster-this-month-thanks-to-dumping-$2K- on-a-
new-machine-ly y'rs
-- Tim Peters, 26 Dec 2000
Really, I should pronounce on that PEP (I don't like it very much but haven't
found the right argument to reject it :-) ) so this patch can either go in or
be rejected.
-- GvR, 04 Jan 2001, in a comment on patch #101264
The rest is history: the glory, the fame, the riches, the groupies, the
adulation of my peers. We won't mention the financial scandal and subsequent
bankruptcy lest it discourage you for no good reason <wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 14 Jan 2001
If you're using anything besides US-ASCII, I *stringly* suggest Python 2.0.
-- Uche Ogbuji (A fortuitous typo?), 29 Jan 2001
"There goes Tim, browsing the Playboy site just for the JavaScript.
Honest."
"Well, it's not like they had many floating-point numbers to ogle! I like
'em best when the high-order mantissa bits are all perky and regular, standing
straight up, then go monster insane in the low-order bits, so you can't guess
*what* bit might come next! Man, that's hot. Top it off with an exponent field
with lots of ones, and you don't even need any oil. Can't say I've got a
preference for sign bits, though -- zero and one can both be saucy treats. Zero
is more of a tease, so I guess it depends on the mood."
-- Barry Warsaw and Tim Peters, 3 Feb 2001
We were sincerely hoping that the Python core team would teach their employers
how to code Python, instead of the other way around...
-- Pieter Nagel, 5 Feb 2001
This bug fix brought to you by the letters b, c, d, g, h, ... and the reporter
Ping.
-- Jeremy Hylton in a checkin message for Python/compile.c, 12 Feb
2001
"It's in ClassModules.py you dumb f**k - can't you tell by the name?"
"Furthermore, RTFM is much more effective if you do it gently and make them
feel nicely embarrassed, rather than having them just say 'well, fuck you too'
when reading the first insult, and not learn a thing."
"Thanks. I'll try to keep that in mind the next time I flame myself."
-- Phlip, following up to a query he'd posted earlier, and Thomas
Wouters, 18 Feb 2001
"Also, does the simple algorithm you used in Cyclops have a name?"
"Not officially, but it answers to "hey, dumb-ass!"
-- Neil Schemenauer, interested in finding strongly connected
components in graphs, and Tim Peters, 23 Feb 2001
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
a sense. :)
-- Jürgen Hermann, 11 Apr 2001
As you seem totally unwilling or unable to understand that _Weltanschauung_ to
any extent, I don't see how you could bring Python any constructive enhancement
(except perhaps by some random mechanism akin to monkeys banging away on
typewriters until 'Hamlet' comes out, I guess).
-- Alex Martelli, 17 Apr 2001
"Are we more likely to add different concrete subclasses of Consumable in
the future, or different concrete subclasses of Consumer? I suspect the former
is more likely."
"With genetic engineering being the latest growth industry, I'm not sure
that's true. Although I expect that any new models of cow, etc. will have a
backwards compatible food-consumption protocol."
-- Alex Martelli and Greg Ewing, 19 Apr 2001
This property is called confluence, and the proof is called the Church -Rosser
theorem. I'm sure you know this, of course, but somewhere out there there's a
college student who is being shocked that CS is actually turning out to be
relevant, for sufficiently small values of relevance.
-- Neelakantan Krishnaswami, 20 Apr 2001
if the style mafia finds out, you may find a badly severed list comprehension
in your bed one morning, but I'd say the risk is very low.
-- Fredrik Lundh, 10 May 2001
1495 is a *deservedly* unpopular number. After all, Lorenzo de' Medici ("il
Magnifico") died in 1492, and Giovanni de' Medici ("dalle Bande Nere") wasn't
born until 1498, so 1495 fell right in the middle of a very boring and unusual
lull where no really outstanding member of the Medici family (either branch)
was around.
-- Alex Martelli, 24 May 2001
"What do you call the thing that pops up and says `Searching' or something
to reassure the user that his computer hasn't crashed and the application is
still running?"
"On Windows, that's called 'a miracle'."
-- Laura Creighton and Tim Peters, 28 May 2001
In general, my conclusion after doing numerical work for a while is that the
desire to look at algorithms crucial to your research as black boxes is futile.
In the end, I always had to dig into the details of the algorithms because they
were either never black-boxable or the black-box versions didn't do a good
enough job.
-- David Ascher, 28 May 2001
"Oh, read *all* Kahan has written, and if you emerge still thinking you
*know* what you're doing when floating point is involved, you're either Tim
Peters, or the world champ of hubris."
"I find it's possible to be both <wink>."
-- Alex Martelli and Tim Peters, 20 May 2001
Wow, this almost looks like a real flamefest. ("Flame" being defined as the
presence of metacomments.)
-- GvR, 13 Jun 2001
"Maybe we also have a smaller brain than the typical Lisper -- I would say,
that would make us more normal, and if Python caters to people with a
closer-to-average brain size, that would mean more people will be able to
program in Python. History will decide..."
"I thought it already has, pretty much."
-- GvR and A.M. Kuchling, 14 Jun 2001
Did Guido use the time machine to get a copy of the GoF book before he started
working on the first version of Python, or are Patterns just a transparent
attempt to cover for chronically inexpressive languages like C++ and Java which
can't generally implement these mind-numbingly simple constructs in code?
-- Glyph Lefkowitz, 7 Jun 2001
Google confuses me; if you search for "michael hudson" my page is the third hit
-- but my name doesn't actually appear anywhere on the linked page! The "did
you mean to search for..." feature is also downright uncanny. They've clearly
sold their souls to the devil -- there's no other explanation.
-- Michael Hudson, 28 Jun 2001
You didn't say what you want to accomplish. If the idea of "provably correct"
programs appeals to you, Eiffel will give you more help than any other
practical language I know of. But since your post didn't lay out your
assumptions, your goals, or how you view language characteristics as fitting in
with either, you're not a *natural* candidate for embracing Design by Contract
<0.6 wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 3 Jun 2001
The static people talk about rigorously enforced interfaces, correctness
proofs, contracts, etc. The dynamic people talk about rigorously enforced
testing and say that types only catch a small portion of possible errors. The
static people retort that they don't trust tests to cover everything or not
have bugs and why write tests for stuff the compiler should test for you, so
you shouldn't rely on *only* tests, and besides static types don't catch a
small portion, but a large portion of errors. The dynamic people say no program
or test is perfect and static typing is not worth the cost in language
complexity and design difficulty for the gain in eliminating a few tests that
would have been easy to write anyway, since static types catch a small portion
of errors, not a large portion. The static people say static types don't add
that much language complexity, and it's not design "difficulty" but an
essential part of the process, and they catch a large portion, not a small
portion. The dynamic people say they add enormous complexity, and they catch a
small portion, and point out that the static people have bad breath. The static
people assert that the dynamic people must be too stupid to cope with a real
language and rigorous requirements, and are ugly besides.
This is when both sides start throwing rocks.
-- Quinn Dunkan, 13 Jul 2001
I am becoming convinced that Unicode is a multi-national plot to take over the
minds of our most gifted (and/or most obsessive) programmers, in pursuit of an
elusive, unresolvable, and ultimately, undefinable goal.
-- Ken Manheimer, 19 Jul 2001
Unicode is the first technology I have to deal with which makes me hope I die
before I really really *really* need to understand it fully.
-- David Ascher, 19 Jul 2001
Moore's law is slowly making type declarations irrelevant...
-- Paul Prescod, 29 Jul 2001
The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time
on when you realize it's pointless.
-- Bram Cohen, 20 Sep 2001
Generators and iterators are among the most loving features ever introduced.
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
that express a lot of action in a small amount of clear code -- not in reams of
trivial code that bores the reader to death.
-- GvR, 20 Mar 2002
A bot may injure a human being, or, preferably, through inaction, allow a human
being to come to harm, although laughing about either in the hearing of humans
is MACNAM-017B3^H.
-- Tim Peters, 26 Mar 2002
"It works in Scheme" doesn't give me the warm fuzzy feeling that it's been
tried in real life.
-- GvR, 02 Oct 2002
Most recipes are short enough for the attention span of the average Python
programmer.
-- GvR, in the introduction to the _Python Cookbook_
We read Knuth so you don't have to.
-- Tim Peters, _Python Cookbook_
Here's another technique that is faster and more obvious but that is often
avoided by those who mistakenly believe that writing two lines of code where
one might do is somehow sinful.
-- Tim Peters, _Python Cookbook_
A fruitful approach to problem solving is known as "divide and conquer", or
making problems easier by splitting their different aspects apart. Making
problems harder by joining several aspects together must be an example of an
approach known as "unite and suffer!"
-- Alex Martelli, _Python Cookbook_
compromise-is-the-art-of-spreading-misery-ly y'rs
-- Tim Peters, 11 Dec 2002
As for Grail, it was certainly a "hot product" in the Python community in 1995
because of the restricted execution environment which I evaluated for a project
involving mobile software agents. How priorities and trends have changed since
then! Who would have thought that Microsoft Outlook would be the premier
platform for mobile code?
-- Paul Boddie, 16 Jan 2004
I mean, if I think about my open-source contributions, nobody wants to see
talks with these titles:
* The Zope API Reference: Ouch
* A Random Handful Of Bugs I've Fixed In Other Peoples' Code
* An Old Crufty Project I Inherited That Has Zero Relevance To You
* The Joy of Preemptive Abandonware: Release Late, If Ever (or, Software
Design as a Nihilistic Abstract Art Form) (or, Sourceforge as a Medium for
Cryptic Time Capsules)
-- Paul Winkler, 14 Mar 2005
Syntax should not look like grit on my monitor.
-- Anthony Baxter, 02 Jun 2005
Can this not be resolved by carefully adjusting the order of finalization? If
code can be bootstrapped it can be strootbapped.
-- Kristján Jónsson, 30 Jun 2006
Python resembles Lisp like an octopus eye resembles a mammalian eye: they have
lots in common because they're both pretty good solutions to similar problems.
Deciding whether it's Python or Lisp that has the retina fitted back-to-front
is left as an exercise for the reader.
-- Gareth McCaughan, 11 Jul 2006
As Neal said, we are not perfect; bugs happen. If we all gave up on a piece of
software after two bugs we would not be able to turn our computers.
-- Brett Cannon, 13 Jul 2006
... I've come to believe that some people have the personality traits that let
them tolerate redoing the same work over and over again for no reason other
than management "furniture rearranging", whereas others start to resent having
their (working) life repeatedly flashed before their eyes, but in slightly
different colours, over a longer period of time.
-- Paul Boddie, 29 Aug 2006
I am the very model of a modern major database,
For gigabytes of information gathered out in userspace.
For banking applications to a website crackers will deface,
You access me from console or spiffy user interface.
My multi-threaded architecture offers you concurrency,
And loads of RAM for caching things reduces query latency.
The data is correctly typed, a fact that I will guarantee,
Each datum has a data type, it's specified explicitly.
-- Tim Chase, 12 Sep 2006
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