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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

Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom
and nobody can read another's code; too little and expressiveness is
endangered.
      -- Guido van Rossum, 13 Aug 1996

[On regression testing] Another approach is to renounce all worldly goods and
retreat to a primitive cabin in Montana, where you can live a life of purity,
unpolluted by technological change. But now and then you can send out little
packages....
      -- Aaron Watters

Ah, you're a recent victim of forceful evangelization. Write your own assert
module, use it, and come back in a few months to tell me whether it really
caught 90% of your bugs.
      -- Guido van Rossum, 7 Feb 1997

The larger scientific computing centers generally have a "theory" division and
a "actually uses the computer" <wink> division. The theory division generally
boasts some excellent theoreticians and designers, while the other division
generally boasts some excellent physical scientists who simply want to get
their work done. In most labs I've seen, the two divisions hate each others'
guts (or, rarely, blissfully ignore each other), & the politics is so thick you
float on it even after they embed your feet in cement blocks (hence even the
simple relief of death is denied you <wink>).
      -- Tim Peters, 25 Mar 1997

In one particular way the conflict is fundamental & eternal: the "working
scientists" generally understand the hardware du jour perfectly, and
passionately resent any attempt to prevent them from fiddling with it directly
-- while the theory folks are forever inventing new ways to hide the hardware
du jour. That two groups can both be so right and so wrong at the same time is
my seventh proof for the existence of God ...
      -- Tim Peters, 25 Mar 1997

You're going to be in a minority - you're coming to Python programming from a
language which offers you a lot more in the way of comfortable operations than
Python, instead of coming from medieval torture chambers like C or Fortran,
which offer so much less.
      -- Andrew Mullhaupt, 26 Jun 1997

...although Python uses an obsolete approach to memory management, it is a
*good* implementation of that approach, as opposed to S, which uses a
combination of bad implementation and demented design decisions to arrive at
what may very well be the worst memory behavior of any actually useful program.
      -- Andrew Mullhaupt, 26 Jun 1997

I suggested holding a "Python Object Oriented Programming Seminar", but the
acronym was unpopular.
      -- Joseph Strout, 28 Feb 1997

Strangely enough I saw just such a beast at the grocery store last night.
Starbucks sells Javachip. (It's ice cream, but that shouldn't be an obstacle
for the Java marketing people.)
      -- 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

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

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.

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

      -- 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.
      -- 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)

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

      -- 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

    The same way as you get the name of that cat you found on your porch: the
cat (object) itself cannot tell you its name, and it doesn't really care -- so
the only way to find out what it's called is to ask all your neighbours
(namespaces) if it's their cat (object)...
    ....and don't be surprised if you'll find that it's known by many names, or
no name at all!
      -- Fredrik Lundh, 3 Nov 2000, in answer to the question "How can I
         get the name of a variable from C++ when I have the PyObject*?"

These are mostly nice features, to be sure, but they're also just that:
features. C++ has features. Python doesn't have a stellar score on my
elegance-o-meter, but for me its major win is the lack of features, and lack of
ambiguities. It fits in my brain.
      -- Quinn Dunkan, 18 Nov 2000

When explaining programming I sometimes compare programmers to photographers:
amateur photographers talk about cameras and lenses and gadgets. They know how
to make their camera do almost anything, and they are keen to argue the merits
of their favorite tools. Professional photographers talk about contrast and
lighting and composition. The camera is almost irrelevant. Ansel Adams used
cameras that were less sophisticated than a supermarket disposable, back when
photography was slow and tedious (like batch-oriented programming). Because the
technology was so primitive, he carefully planned his photographs and developed
discipline so he could reliably make excellent photographs over and over.
      -- Greg Jorgensen, 26 Nov 2000

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

multiple inheritance from a mix of new- and classic-style classes.
      -- Tim Peters in a checkin message, 14 Nov 2001

My late father-in-law, Ray Pigozzi, was an extremely talented architect (he was
made a fellow of the AIA in the late 70's or early 80's), and although he was
by all accounts an excellent mentor to younger architects in the firm he
cofounded, he also had the well- deserved reputation of being quite laconic
(this I know from personal experience ;-). Early in his career, he received an
award from some masonry organization for his use of brick in building OWP (now
OWP&P) had designed. This necessitated the usual awards ceremony with dinner
and speeches. The recipients who preceeded Ray to the podium all spoke at
length about their work. Ray's entire acceptance speech was, "The building
speaks for itself."
      -- Skip Montanaro, 4 Jan 2002

The Lisp community is like a ghost town, with the occasional banshee howl
echoing darkly around the chamber in lament of what might have been.
      -- Courageous, 19 Jan 2002

I'll lend you _Calendrical Calculations_. Even *skimming* the chapters on some
of the world's other calendrical delights makes our date gimmicks blind via the
intensity of their clarity.
      -- Tim Peters, 05 Mar 2002

The joy of coding Python should be in seeing short, concise, readable classes
that express a lot of action in a small amount of clear code -- not in reams of
trivial code that bores the reader to death.
      -- GvR, 20 Mar 2002

A bot may injure a human being, or, preferably, through inaction, allow a human
being to come to harm, although laughing about either in the hearing of humans
is MACNAM-017B3^H.
      -- Tim Peters, 26 Mar 2002

"It works in Scheme" doesn't give me the warm fuzzy feeling that it's been
tried in real life.
      -- GvR, 02 Oct 2002

Most recipes are short enough for the attention span of the average Python
programmer.
      -- 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