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      -- Jeremy Hylton, 29 Apr 1997

    A little girl goes into a pet show and asks for a wabbit. The shop keeper
looks down at her, smiles and says:
    "Would you like a lovely fluffy little white rabbit, or a cutesy wootesly
little brown rabbit?"
    "Actually", says the little girl, "I don't think my python would notice."
      -- Told by Nick Leaton, 4 Dec 1996

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

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

viability of free software and open source, but I do have a strong, clear sense
that such things make it possible for me to do my job, as a programmer and a
facilitator of/participant in online communities, better and more easily than I
otherwise could do.
      -- Ken Manheimer, 24 Jan 1999

    Every standard applies to a certain problem domain and a certain level. A
standard can work perfectly and save the world economy billions of dollars and
there will still be software and hardware compatibility problems. In fact,
solving one level of compatibility just gives rise to the next level of
incompatibility. For example, connecting computers together through standard
protocols gives rise to the problem of byte endianness issues. Solving byte
endianness gives rise to the problem of character sets. Solving character sets
gives rise to the problem of end-of-line and end-of-file conventions. Solving
that gets us to the problem of interpreting the low-level syntax (thus XML).
Then we need to interpet that syntax in terms of objects and properties (thus
RDF, WDDX, etc.). And so forth.
    We could judge a standard's success by its ability to reveal another level
of standardization that is necessary.
      -- Paul Prescod, 24 Jan 1999

I just want to go on the record as being completely opposed to computer
languages. Let them have their own language and soon they'll be off in the
corner plotting with each other!
      -- Steven D. Majewski, 25 Jan 1999

Constraints often boost creativity.
      -- Jim Hugunin, 11 Feb 1999

Programming is no different - it's only by going outside what you know, and
looking from another direction (working, if you like, your brain, so that it
can be more powerful :-) that you can improve further.
      -- Andrew Cooke, 12 Feb 1999

any-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-is-too-mysterious- to- trust-ly
y'rs
      -- Tim Peters, 16 Feb 1999

    "I don't think we've thought of this, and it's actually a good idea."
    "I'd better go patent it!"
      -- Uche Ogbuji and Paul Prescod, 16 Feb 1999

Contrary to advertising, no parsing system is "easy to learn", in or out of the
Python world -- parsing is a hard problem. Most are easy enough to use after
practice, though. Ironically, the trickiest system of all to master (regexps)
is also the feeblest and the most widely used.
      -- Tim Peters, 17 Feb 1999

So Python's only cross-platform choices were to mimic the C/POSIX API or invent
its own new x-platform API; only one of those is realistic (as Java proves
every day <wink>).
      -- Tim Peters, 21 Feb 1999

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

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

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
         code, 19 Jun 2000

I vote for backward compatibility for now, and not only because that will
irritate /F the most.
      -- Tim Peters, 30 Jun 2000

A comment is in order then. If the code is smarter than it looks, most people
aren't going to think it looks very smart.
      -- Jeremy Hylton, 6 Jul 2000

You and I think too much alike ?!ng. And if that doesn't scare you now, you
should have a talk with Gordon.
      -- Barry Warsaw, 12 Jul 2000

Isn't it somewhat of a political statement to allow marriages of three or more
items? I always presumed that this function was n-ary, like map().
      -- Paul Prescod, on the proposed name marry() for a function to
         combine sequences, 12 Jul 2000

Since my finger was slowest reaching my nose, I got elected Editor. On the
positive side of that, I get to make the early decisions that will be cursed
for generations of Python hackers to come.
      -- Barry Warsaw, 12 Jul 2000

Hey, you know, we can work this in. Sailor Moon + Giant Robots + Tentacle
Demons + Python Conference == Bizarre hilarity ensues!
      -- Alexander Williams, 4 Aug 2000

The rapid establishment of social ties, even of a fleeting nature, advance not
only that goal but its standing in the uberconscious mesh of communal psychic,
subjective, and algorithmic interbeing. But I fear I'm restating the obvious.
      -- Will Ware, 28 Aug 2000

The comp.lang.python newsgroup erupted last week with a flurry of posts that
accused the Python development team of creeping featurism, selling out the
language to corporate interests, moving too fast, and turning a deaf ear to the
Python community. What triggered this lava flow of accusations? The development
team accepted a proposal to change the syntax of the print statement.
      -- Stephen Figgins, 30 Aug 2000

    INTERVIEWER: Tell us how you came to be drawn into the world of pragmas.
    COMPILER WRITER: Well, it started off with little things. Just a few
boolean flags, a way to turn asserts on and off, debug output, that sort of
thing. I thought, what harm can it do? It's not like I'm doing anything you
couldn't do with command line switches, right? Then it got a little bit
heavier, integer values for optimisation levels, even the odd string or two.
Before I knew it I was doing the real hard stuff, constant expressions,
conditionals, the whole shooting box. Then one day when I put in a hook for
making arbitrary calls into the interpreter, that was when I finally realised I
had a problem...
      -- Greg Ewing, 31 Aug 2000

The modules people have built for Python are like the roads the Romans built
through Europe. On this solid ground, you can move fast as you work on aspects
of program design that aren't so analytical -- user interface, multi-threaded
event dispatching models, all kinds of things that can be done a lot of
different ways and are hard to get right the first time through.
      -- Donn Cave, 3 Sep 2000

Python 2.0 beta 1 is now available from BeOpen PythonLabs. There is a long list
of new features since Python 1.6, released earlier today. We don't plan on any
new releases in the next 24 hours.
      -- Jeremy Hylton, in the 2.0b1 announcement, 5 Sep 2000

Fortunately, you've left that madness behind, and entered the clean, happy, and
safe Python world of transvestite lumberjacks and singing Vikings.
      -- Quinn Dunkan, 17 Sep 2000

Regular expressions are among my most valued tools, along with goto, eval,
multiple inheritance, preemptive multithreading, floating point, run-time type
identification, a big knife, a bottle of bleach, and 120VAC electricity. All of
these things suck sometimes.
      -- Kragen Sitaker, 27 Sep 2000

    IIRC, he didn't much care for regexps before, but actually writing a regexp
engine drives most people who do it to intense hatred.
    Just more of the magic of Python! Transmuting a few peoples' intense agony
into the subject of others' idle amusement <wink>.
      -- Tim Peters, 27 Sep 2000

"I do not love thee, lambda; let me count the ways..."
      -- Aahz Maruch, 27 Sep 2000

They are called "Exceptions" because to any policy for handling them, imposed
in advance upon all programmers by the computer system, some programmers will
have good reason to take exception.
      -- William Kahan, quoted by Tim Peters, 13 Oct 2000

"Interim steps" have a tendency to become permanent in our industry, where
"Compatibility" is the way the sins of the fathers are inflicted upon the third
and fourth generations ...
      -- William Kahan, quoted by Huaiyu Zhu, 16 Oct 2000

The most successful projects I've seen and been on *did* rewrite all the code
routinely, but one subsystem at a time. This happens when you're tempted to add
a hack, realize it wouldn't be needed if an entire area were reworked, and mgmt
is bright enough to realize that hacks compound in fatal ways over time. The
"ain't broke, don't fix" philosophy is a good guide here, provided you've got a
very low threshold for insisting "it's broke".
      -- Tim Peters, 25 Oct 2000

Humour is a tricky thing. Some people can't even get the spelling right.
      -- Richard Brodie, 30 Oct 2000