ACME-QuoteDB
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-- Guido van Rossum, 6 Dec 1991
The details of that silly code are irrelevant.
-- Tim Peters, 4 Mar 1992
Frankly, I'd rather not try to compete with Perl in the areas where Perl is
best -- it's a battle that's impossible to win, and I don't think it is a good
idea to strive for the number of obscure options and shortcuts that Perl has
acquired through the years.
-- Guido van Rossum, 7 Jul 1992
Python is a truly wonderful language. When somebody comes up with a good idea
it takes about 1 minute and five lines to program something that almost does
what you want. Then it takes only an hour to extend the script to 300 lines,
after which it still does almost what you want.
-- Jack Jansen, 8 Jul 1992
If you have a browser from CERN's WWW project (World-Wide Web, a distributed
hypertext system) you can browse a WWW hypertext version of the manual...
-- Guido van Rossum, 19 Nov 1992 [First mention of the Web on python-
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
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
-- 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
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
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
"My course members are almost all coming from Math, and the first question
was 'why isn't it complete?' Just a matter of elegance."
"Oh, don't worry. My background is math. This is actually good for them --
like discovering that Santa Claus doesn't really exist."
-- Christian Tismer and Guido van Rossum, 2 Dec 1998
One of my cheap entertainments is axiomatizing characterizations of [Tim
Peters]. I think I've come up with a minimal one: the only c.l.p poster more
concerned with working non-legal code than non-working legal code.
-- Cameron Laird, 2 Dec 1998
PYTHON = (P)rogrammers (Y)earning (T)o (H)omestead (O)ur (N)oosphere.
-- Seen in Sean McGrath's .sig, 3 Dec 1998
I never realized it before, but having looked that over I'm certain I'd rather
have my eyes burned out by zombies with flaming dung sticks than work on a
conscientious Unicode regex engine.
-- Tim Peters, 3 Dec 1998
"Python? Oh, I've heard of that. I have a friend at the NSA who uses it."
-- Overhead at a meeting, quoted in c.l.p on 3 Dec 1998
I think Gordon has priority on this one, since it's clearly a consequence of
his observation that tim_one despises and deplores anything useful. Which has
greater explanatory power, since I've often noted that tim_one complains about
legal working code too! Anything that works may be useful, right? Brrrrr. Must
destroy.
-- Tim Peters in the third person, 3 Dec 1998
"Eric has a way of explaining what we're doing and why we're doing it," says
Guido van Rossum, the inventor of a programming language called Python and a
prominent figure among open-source proponents. Van Rossum, a gawky Dutchman who
now lives in Reston, invited Raymond to address a group of Python software
developers in Houston...
-- From the _Washington Post_, 3 Dec 1998
Subclassing with a mixin doesn't let you, for example, interfere with how an
existing attribute is accessed. The general idea here is to kidnap the object,
skin it, then waltz around in public impersonating it. All without letting the
programmer / user know he's been bamboozled.
-- Gordon McMillan, 3 Dec 1998
Hey, while they're all eating dinner, let's sneak in a keyword!
emancipate variable: declare absolute freedom for one variable. It can be
whatever it wants whenever it wants in whatever form it wants in whatever
language it wants on whatever computer it wants. In the ensuing chaos it will
get nothing done, but it will give programmers stories to tell for years to
come...
-- Mike Fletcher, 25 Dec 1998
"Can we kill this thread? The only thing it does as far as I'm concerned is
increase the posting statistics. :-)"
"don't-open-cans-of-worms-unless-you're-looking-for-a-new-diet-ly y'rs"
-- Guido van Rossum and Tim Peters, 6 Jan 1999
Hey, that was the first truly portable laptop! Of course I'm nostalgic.
Came with a mighty 24Kb RAM standard, & I popped the extra $80 to max it out at
32Kb. Much of Cray's register assigner was developed on that beast: unlike the
prototype Crays of the time, the M100 was always available and never crashed.
Even better, I could interrupt it any time, poke around, and resume right where
it left off <wink>.
m100-basic-reminded-me-a-lot-of-python-except-that-it-sucked-ly y'rs
-- Tim Peters remembering the Model 100, 10 Jan 1999
"Heh -- all it really broke so far was my resistance to installing Tk. I
suppose wizardry is inevitable after one installs something, though <wink>."
"Spoken like a truly obsessive-compulsive wizard! It-takes-one-to-know
-one..."
-- Tim Peters and Guido van Rossum, 6 Jan 1999
Note, however, that architectural forms are completely declarative and can be
implemented in a highly optimized fashion. The sorts of extensions that
Microsoft has proposed for XSL (<xsl:eval>...</>) would completely destroy
those features. Architectural mapping would, in general, be as reliable and
high performance as ordinary software -- (not at all).
-- Paul Prescod, 6 Jan 1999
Darned confusing, unless you have that magic ingredient *coffee*, of which I
can pay you Tuesday for a couple pounds of extra-special grind today.
-- John Mitchell, 11 Jan 1999
That's so obvious that someone has already got a patent on it.
-- Guido van Rossum, 12 Jan 1999
I have to stop now. I've already told you more than I know.
-- Wolf Logan, 14 Jan 1999
I really don't have any incisive insights about the economic mechanisms or
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.
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
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
See, functional programmers are an insular lot. You rarely see them in
public, except at parades when they all have antler- hats and silly shoes on.
So they completely missed the infamous "goto considered harmful" thread and
didn't even realize they were doing anything wrong.
Now, let's pretend you're writing a 'bot that can pass as a functional
programmer. There's a complex protocol here. When two functional programmers
see each other on the street, they recognize each other by the antler hats. But
in certain parts of the Midwest, regular people wear antler hats, too. So
there's a protocol. First a <wink wink>. Then the secret handshake. Then you
sniff each other's armpits and stamp your foot 3 times.
OK, so you've written a bot, and it works fine on the street. Now you send
it to a cocktail party. It sees a potential functional programmer and gives the
<wink wink>. Now it tries to move into position to do the secret handshake, but
discovers that it's antler-hat is entangled with someone else's. Oops. <wink
wink> at the new guy. Handshake. But before it can sniff, the first one has
moved up for his handshake. Ay yi yi. Your bot crashes and is exposed.
So now you rewrite your bot to use a finite state machine so it can handle
multiple sessions. That means throwing out all the code that worked on the
street. But if you'd used continuations, it would be a relatively minor
adjustment of that code. 'Course you wouldn't have had to write the bot to
begin with.
-- Gordon McMillan, 18 Feb 2000
IIRC, Guido went to CNRI to work on bots and agents or something similar. Could
the timbot and the effbot be an offshoot of that? Next, he's going to start a
company with timbot and effbot as the main products. Van Rossum's Universal
Robots?
-- Bernhard Herzog, 21 Feb 2000
So those are the extremes: Boehm-Demers-Weiser avoids blame by refusing to do
anything. Java avoids blame by exposing an impossibly baroque
implementation-driven finalization model. Scheme avoids blame by refusing to do
anything "by magic", but helps you to shoot yourself with the weapon of your
choice. The bad news is that I don't know of a scheme *not* at an extreme!
-- Tim Peters on the knotty problem of finalizers and cycles, 3 Mar
2000
It's extremely un-Pythonic to let things leak (despite that it has let things
leak for a decade <wink>), but also extremely un-Pythonic to make some wild-ass
guess.
-- Tim Peters on garbage collection, 3 Mar 2000
IOW, the only people who lose under this scheme are the ones begging to lose,
and their "loss" consists of taking responsibility.
-- Tim Peters, 3 Mar 2000
An axiom is accepted without proof: we have plenty of proof that there's no
thoroughly good answer (i.e., every language that has ever addressed this issue
-- along with every language that ever will <wink>).
-- Tim Peters on garbage collection, 3 Mar 2000
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
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
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.
They will give and give, without ever asking anything from you save the
privilege of gracing your code, waiting with eager anticipation for you to
resume them at your pleasure, or even to discard them if you tire of their
charms. In fact, they're almost pathologically yielding.
-- Tim Peters, 18 Oct 2001
IMO a bunch of the frustration I sometimes feel with Python comes from its
originally being intended as a "glue" language. It's too good for that, and
finds itself used as a work horse or even a race horse. Neither type of horse
belongs in the glue factory ;-).
-- Paul Rubin, 30 Oct 2001
"Which inevitably has the followup rhyme 'There was a young man from
Verdun'."
"But somehow no one ever seems to be able to remember what it was about the
man from Abdero."
-- Simon Callan and Gareth McCaughan, 04 Nov 2001, after someone
quoted the limerick "There was a young man from Wooloomooloo /
Whose limericks always finished on line two."
Sometimes I feel like I'm reinventing Zope, but at least it's a Zope I
understand.
-- Quinn Dunkan, 05 Nov 2001 on the quixote-users list
Homological algebra beckons -- brain relief in this context!
-- Michael Hudson, 07 Nov 2001, in a discussion of Stackless Python
If you're talking "useful", I'm not your bot.
-- Tim Peters, 08 Nov 2001
"How do you do a range of floats?"
"Bring flowers, and buy them all nice dinners. Try not to be *too* obvious
that you're out to do them, though."
-- Thomas Wouters and Tim Peters, 09 Nov 2001
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