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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
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

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

    I can see the FAQ now...
    Q1.1.2.3: Why can't I divide integers?
    A: You drooling moron! You need a 10-page owners manual and instructional
video to handle the notational complexity of Tic-Tacs, don't you? As every
schoolboy knows, the integers are a *ring*, not a field, you simpering
simpleton. Oh wait! Let me guess! I have to spell it out for you, you festering
wombat boil. You can't divide integers by integers and get integers. Understand
now? Now go out there and don't do it. And read Herstein, while you're at it.
      -- Johann Hibschman, 4 Mar 2000

Actually, I believe you understand me fine, you'd just rather not believe it:
floating point sucks, rationals suck, refusing to allow int division sucks, the
constructive reals suck, symbolic manipulation sucks, ..., but all in different
ways for different reasons. Every one bristles with its own brands of both
shallow and deep "surprises". So it goes -- seeking to represent the infinite
by the finite is an inherently unreachable goal. This is also why people die
<wink>.
      -- Tim Peters, 4 Mar 2000

    The reason I'm right is that I said there won't be any *single* "survivor"
of the evolutionary struggle, and that the efforts to crown one's favorite as
such are just so much noise. The software ecosystem of the foreseeable future
will always have its own form of "diversity": there will be lions *and*
elephants *and* fish *and* seals *and* birds, because there will be many
diverse "habitats" where the particular adaptations of each will be
needed/advantageous.
    The reasoned debates (as opposed to religious wars) may lead to lions with
opposable thumbs, or elephants that can see in the infrared, but there will
never be a 2000-pound fish with a mane and wings. Well, not outside the lab,
anyway.
      -- Ran, 5 Mar 2000

"Complexity" seems to be a lot like "energy": you can *transfer* it from the
end user to one/some of the other players, but the total amount seems to remain
pretty much constant for a given task.
      -- Ran, 5 Mar 2000

LaTeX2HTML is pain.
      -- Fred Drake in a documentation checkin message, 14 Mar 2000

Here, have some cycles of reversed kielbasa. And ten (10 (0xa (101010b)))
Usenet Points, redeemable in comp.lang.python for increased local prestige.
Some prestige may depend upon your own actions. Local Prestige may or may not
have any effect on your actual life (or lack thereof).
      -- William Tanksley, 21 Mar 2000

Mucking with builtins is fun the way huffing dry erase markers is fun. Things
are very pretty at first, but eventually the brain cell lossage will more than
outweigh that cheap thrill.
      -- Barry Warsaw, 23 Mar 2000

    >Have you ever looked at the output of a bib | tbl | eqn pipeline?
    Are you kids still using that as a pick-up line?
      -- Roy Smith and Cameron Laird, 4 Apr 2000

This is like getting lost in a dictionary. What does quincuncial mean anyhow?
      -- Dennis Hamilton, 4 Apr 2000

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