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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

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