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Yes: the code in ntpath.split is too clever to have any hope of working
correctly <wink>.
      -- Tim Peters, 19 Mar 1999

Thanks. The sooner I get discouraged and quit, the more time I'll save overall.
      -- Frank Sergeant, 28 Mar 1999

But it's a general way to debug: tell someone what right things your program is
doing. Chances are that you will see the wrong thing(s) before the other person
has said anything... I just stick a picture of a face on my monitor and talk to
it to find bugs.
      -- Richard van de Stadt, 9 Apr 1999

Might just be nostalgia, but I think I would give an arm or two to get that
(not necessarily my own, though).
      -- Fredrik Lundh, 13 May 1999

    1. Beautiful is better than ugly.
    2. Explicit is better than implicit.
    3. Simple is better than complex.
    4. Complex is better than complicated.
    5. Flat is better than nested.
    6. Sparse is better than dense.
    7. Readability counts.
    8. Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
    9. Although practicality beats purity.
    10. Errors should never pass silently.
    11. Unless explicitly silenced.
    12. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
    13. There should be one -- and preferably only one -- obvious way to do it.
    14. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
    15. Now is better than never.
    16. Although never is often better than *right* now.
    17. If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
    18. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
    19. Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
      -- Tim Peters' 19 Pythonic Theses, 4 Jun 1999

    "However, I've heard that after about 10K items in a dict, it starts having
problems."
    "11,523 to be exact. After that, dicts drink to excess and show up for work
late the morning after. We don't like to talk about it, though."
      -- Aahz Maruch and Tim Peters, 8 Jun 1999

Stackless Python 0.2, a plug-in replacement for the Python core that does not
use the C stack, has been announced by Christian Tismer as the best way to
prove that it was possible without a major rewrite to the core. Neel
Krishnaswami commented to Christian, "This is very neat, and you are completely
deranged".
      -- From Linux Weekly News, 17 Jul 1999

... we need more people like him, who are willing to explore without being
driven to argue with people about it.
      -- William Tanksley on Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, 2 Jul 1999

Sorry for the term, I picked it up from Jim Fulton back when it was an
about-to-be-added feature for Principia/Aqueduct. As with so many Fultonisms,
it's vivid and tends to stick in one's (non-pluggable) brain.
      -- Paul Everitt on the term "pluggable brains", 5 Jul 1999

I picture a lump of inanimate flesh (a result from a relational database query)
being infused with the spark of life (object behavior, aka class).
      -- Jim Fulton on the term "pluggable brains", 5 Jul 1999

This is good. It means that while Ionesco is dead, his spirit lives on.
      -- Gordon McMillan on how Windows attaches meaning to 3-character
         file extensions, 30 Jul 1999

(On the statement print "42 monkeys"+"1 snake") BTW, both Perl and Python get
this wrong. Perl gives 43 and Python gives "42 monkeys1 snake", when the answer
is clearly "41 monkeys and 1 fat snake".
      -- Jim Fulton, 10 Aug 1999

I expect that what you really object to is the absence of control structures
other than goto, and the LT/GE/etc spelling of comparison operators. That was
common enough in its day, and even by the time Pascal came around the keypunch
I used still didn't have a semicolon key. It looks ugly in retrospect only
because it is <wink>.
      -- Tim Peters on SNOBOL4, 17 Aug 1999

Theory and reality rarely are kissing cousins.
      -- Christopher Petrilli, 1 Sep 1999

Features generally don't exist in isolation, and you have to look at all the
consequences, not just the one that attracts you at first sight.
      -- Tim Peters, 3 Sep 1999

The danger in this line of thinking is not realizing that the computational
effort involved in big NP complete problems is *so* huge that even in optimized
micro-code, the algorithm might take a million years to run. Tweezers or shovel
-- it makes little difference when you are trying to move a universe...
      -- Sean McGrath, 4 Sep 1999

On a scale of one to ten I'd give it a tim.
      -- William Tanksley, 13 Sep 1999

Statistical analysis shows that the junk looks like human text, which clearly
shows that it is actually used in some yet unknown way. (docstrings?)
      -- Fredrik Lundh, writing about junk DNA, 5 Oct 1999

If I engineer code that I expect to be in use for N years, I make damn sure
that every internal limit is at least 10x larger than the largest I can
conceive of a user making reasonable use of at the end of those N years. The
invariable result is that the N years pass, and fewer than half of the users
have bumped into the limit <0.5 wink>.
      -- Tim Peters, 11 Nov 1999

I don't think the bytecodehacks, while sufficiently dark and useless to be a
tim-ism, qualify me in any way for a Pythonic Wizard Hat...
      -- Michael Hudson, 16 Nov 1999

The bottom tier is what a certain class of wanker would call "business
objects"...
      -- Greg Ward, 9 Dec 1999

Since I've done fewer than my normal quota of futile things this week, I
thought I'd post to remind people that ...
      -- Phil Austin, 9 Dec 1999

There are useful diagrams in UML, (eg, the state and transition diagrams).
Unfortunately, the one most tools use to generate code (and draw from reverse
engineering) has everything to do with language structure, and nothing to do
with what actually happens at runtime. To put it bluntly: people spend most of
their time designing the wrong thing. Worse, they get it wrong, but it's carved
in stone now; so the final system is either needlessly complex and marginally
functional, or bears no resemblance to the "design".
      -- Gordon McMillan, 15 Dec 1999

The secret to good performance is to prototype and prototype, then code the
bottlenecks in a faster language. The secret to large systems is to prototype
and prototype, until you've got clean separation of the system into managable
pieces, then code in whatever language most suits the need of each piece.
      -- Gordon McMillan, 15 Dec 1999

When Jim [Fulton] says "tricky" it means your brain could explode.
      -- Michel Pelletier, 15 Dec 1999

You have start-tags, attributes, end-tags and character data. We have all seen
"XML applications" and "XML parsers" which handle this gang- of-four concepts.
... Now we can peer over the parapet and shout "your parser smells of
elderberries" or "I wave my mixed content at your ankles", as long as we like
but the simple gang-of-four base apps will not go away.
      -- Sean McGrath, 19 Dec 1999

Abstraction is one of those notions that Python tosses out the window, yet
expresses very well.
      -- Gordon McMillan, 6 Jan 2000

The set of naming conventions has a cardinality equal to the number of Python
users.
      -- Gordon McMillan, 6 Jan 2000

The way to build large Python applications is to componentize and
loosely-couple the hell out of everything.
      -- Aahz Maruch, 6 Jan 2000

It's not the mail volume that bothers me -- I can ignore 100s of messages a day
very quickly. It's the time it takes to respond to all of them.
      -- Guido van Rossum, 20 Jan 2000

This is the way of Haskell or Design by Contract of Eiffel. This one is like
wearing a XV century armor, you walk very safely but in a very tiring way.
      -- Manuel Gutierrez Algaba, 26 Jan 2000

Life's better without braces.
      -- Unofficial motto of IPC8, coined by Bruce Eckel

"Aggressive" means "sometimes wrong".
      -- John Aycock at IPC8, during his "Agressive Type Inferencing" talk

Do I do everything in C++ and teach a course in advanced swearing?
      -- David Beazley at IPC8, on choosing a language for teaching

Alice is 3D Logo on steroids.
      -- Randy Pausch at IPC8

I was willing to grant this one at once, but, now that I look back at it all --
the loyalty oaths, the relentless self-criticism sessions, the midnight visits
from the Ministry of Love -- I'm afraid what we really have here is unspeakably
more sinister.
      -- Tim Peters after a reference to "Python's cult-like following", 2
         Feb 2000

Guido (like us!) is a bit schizophrenic here: he wants to be a benevolent
dictator, but also wants to treat people like grownups. This probably worked
better before Python got a large American audience <0.9 wink>.
      -- Tim Peters, 10 Feb 2000

I have formal proofs that any change of the indentation rules results in 35%
increase of the page faults for only 63.7% of the cache misses. The net effect
is an overall slowdown of 10%.
      -- Vladimir Marangozov after Yet Another indentation flamewar, 16 Feb
         2000

... let me just say that my least-favourite Python error message is
"SyntaxError: invalid syntax", which somehow manages to be both overly terse
and redundant at the same time.
      -- Greg Ward, 15 Feb 2000

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

UTF-8 has a certain purity in that it equally annoys every nation, and is
nobody's default encoding.
      -- Andy Robinson, 10 Apr 2000

    "Now if we could figure out where python programmers are from, someone
could write a book and get rich."
    "Yorkshire."
      -- Quinn Dunkan and Warren Postma, 11 Apr 2000

If I didn't have my part-time performance art income to help pay the bills, I
could never afford to support my programming lifestyle.
      -- Jeff Bauer, 21 Apr 2000

Of course, this brought me face to face once again with Python's _pons
asinorum_, the significance of whitespace.
      -- Eric S. Raymond, in the _Linux Journal_'s Python supplement

Surprisingly enough, Python has taught me more about Lisp than Lisp ever did
;-).
      -- Glyph Lefkowitz, 3 May 2000

How about we notate the hungarian notation with the type of hungarian notation,
you know, hungarian meta notation: HWND
aWin32ApiHandleDefinedInWindowsDotH_hwndWindowHandle;
      -- Warren Postma, 4 May 2000

Note that Python's licence is in fact the MIT X11 licence, with MIT filed off
and CNRI written in its place in crayon.
      -- A.M. Kuchling, 5 May 2000

Once you've read and understood _The Art of the Metaobject Protocol_ you are
one quarter of the way to provisional wizard status. (The other three-fourths
are b) understanding Haskell's monads, c) grokking Prolog, and d) becoming
handy with a combinator- based language by implementing a Forth.)
      -- Neel Krishnaswami, 9 May 2000

"The future" has arrived but they forgot to update the docs.
      -- R. David Murray, 9 May 2000

/* This algorithm is from a book written before the invention of structured
programming... */
      -- Comment in parser/pgen.c, noted by Michael Hudson

For more information please see my unpublished manuscript on steam driven
turing machines. [2000pp in crayon donated to the harvard library -- they never
told me whether they filed it under mathematics, philosophy, logic, mechanical
engineering, or computational science]
      -- Aaron Watters, 12 May 2000

    Me? I hate the whole lambda calculus, not because of what it is, but
because of what many people think it is. They think that it's the whole of
computer science, the ultimate way to express and reason about programs, when
in reality it's merely a shabby and incomplete model of how Fortran fails to
work. The first thing SICP has to do is teach everyone how bad the lambda
calculus model is -- as part of teaching them about a language allegedly based
on lambda calculus.
    I'm sorry, was my bias showing again? :-)
      -- William Tanksley, 13 May 2000

I never got beyond starting the data-structures in C++, I never got beyond
seeing how it would work in Scheme. I finished it in one Python -filled
afternoon, and discovered the idea sucked big time. I was glad I did it in
Python, because it only cost me one afternoon to discover the idea sucks.
      -- Moshe Zadka, 13 May 2000

In truth, we use 'j' to represent sqrt(-1) for exactly the same reason we use a
convention for the direction of current which is exactly the opposite of the
direction the electrons actually travel: because it drives physicists crazy.
(And if we pick up a few mathematicians or whatever along the way, well, that's
just gravy. ;-)
      -- Grant R. Griffin, 14 May 2000

Unicode: everyone wants it, until they get it.
      -- Barry Warsaw, 16 May 2000

I saw a hack you sent me a few months ago and approved of its intent and was
saddened by its necessity.
      -- Jim Fulton, 16 May 2000

Suspicions are most easily dispelled/confirmed via evidence, and taking the
trouble to do this has the pleasant side-effect that you can either cease
expending effort worrying, or move directly to taking positive action to
correct the problem.
      -- Neel Krishnaswami, 21 May 2000

Thanks to the overnight turnaround and the early interpreter's habit of
returning nothing at all useful if faced with a shortage of )s, one could
easily detect the LISP users: they tended to walk around with cards full of
)))))))... in their shirt pockets, to be slapped onto the end of submitted card
decks: one at least got something back if there were too many )s.
      -- John W. Baxter, 21 May 2000

Python: embodies a harmony of chocolate kisses with hints of jasmine and rose.
Trussardi's wild new fragrance.
      -- From _Marie Claire_, Australian edition, May 2000; noted by Fiona
         Czuczman

In arts, compromises yield mediocre results. The personality and vision of the
artist has to go through. I like to see Python as a piece of art. I just hope
the artist will not get too tainted by usability studies.
      -- François Pinard, 22 May 2000

In fact, I've never seen an argument about which I cared less. I'm completely
case insensitivity insensitive.
      -- William Tanksley, 23 May 2000

They boo-ed when Dylan went electric. But for me its about the instincts of a
designer, and the faith of a fan. Not science. So much the better.
      -- Arthur Siegel, 23 May 2000

Burroughs did something very odd with COBOL at one point (and no, it wasn't The
Naked Lunch).
      -- Will Rose, 27 May 2000

Code generators are hacks. Sometimes necessary hacks, but hacks nevertheless.
      -- Paul Prescod, 7 Jun 2000

Very rough; like estimating the productivity of a welder by the amount of
acetylene used.
      -- Paul Svensson, on measuring programmer productivity by lines of

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

      -- 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