ACME-QuoteDB
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-- 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
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
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
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
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
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
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)
is also the feeblest and the most widely used.
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
I saw a hack you sent me a few months ago and approved of its intent and was
saddened by its necessity.
-- Jim Fulton, 16 May 2000
Suspicions are most easily dispelled/confirmed via evidence, and taking the
trouble to do this has the pleasant side-effect that you can either cease
expending effort worrying, or move directly to taking positive action to
correct the problem.
-- Neel Krishnaswami, 21 May 2000
Thanks to the overnight turnaround and the early interpreter's habit of
returning nothing at all useful if faced with a shortage of )s, one could
easily detect the LISP users: they tended to walk around with cards full of
)))))))... in their shirt pockets, to be slapped onto the end of submitted card
decks: one at least got something back if there were too many )s.
-- John W. Baxter, 21 May 2000
Python: embodies a harmony of chocolate kisses with hints of jasmine and rose.
Trussardi's wild new fragrance.
-- From _Marie Claire_, Australian edition, May 2000; noted by Fiona
Czuczman
In arts, compromises yield mediocre results. The personality and vision of the
artist has to go through. I like to see Python as a piece of art. I just hope
the artist will not get too tainted by usability studies.
-- François Pinard, 22 May 2000
In fact, I've never seen an argument about which I cared less. I'm completely
case insensitivity insensitive.
-- William Tanksley, 23 May 2000
They boo-ed when Dylan went electric. But for me its about the instincts of a
designer, and the faith of a fan. Not science. So much the better.
-- Arthur Siegel, 23 May 2000
Burroughs did something very odd with COBOL at one point (and no, it wasn't The
Naked Lunch).
-- Will Rose, 27 May 2000
Code generators are hacks. Sometimes necessary hacks, but hacks nevertheless.
-- Paul Prescod, 7 Jun 2000
Very rough; like estimating the productivity of a welder by the amount of
acetylene used.
-- Paul Svensson, on measuring programmer productivity by lines of
code, 19 Jun 2000
I vote for backward compatibility for now, and not only because that will
irritate /F the most.
-- Tim Peters, 30 Jun 2000
A comment is in order then. If the code is smarter than it looks, most people
aren't going to think it looks very smart.
-- Jeremy Hylton, 6 Jul 2000
You and I think too much alike ?!ng. And if that doesn't scare you now, you
should have a talk with Gordon.
-- Barry Warsaw, 12 Jul 2000
Isn't it somewhat of a political statement to allow marriages of three or more
items? I always presumed that this function was n-ary, like map().
-- Paul Prescod, on the proposed name marry() for a function to
combine sequences, 12 Jul 2000
Since my finger was slowest reaching my nose, I got elected Editor. On the
positive side of that, I get to make the early decisions that will be cursed
for generations of Python hackers to come.
-- Barry Warsaw, 12 Jul 2000
Hey, you know, we can work this in. Sailor Moon + Giant Robots + Tentacle
Demons + Python Conference == Bizarre hilarity ensues!
-- Alexander Williams, 4 Aug 2000
The rapid establishment of social ties, even of a fleeting nature, advance not
only that goal but its standing in the uberconscious mesh of communal psychic,
subjective, and algorithmic interbeing. But I fear I'm restating the obvious.
-- Will Ware, 28 Aug 2000
The comp.lang.python newsgroup erupted last week with a flurry of posts that
accused the Python development team of creeping featurism, selling out the
language to corporate interests, moving too fast, and turning a deaf ear to the
Python community. What triggered this lava flow of accusations? The development
team accepted a proposal to change the syntax of the print statement.
-- Stephen Figgins, 30 Aug 2000
INTERVIEWER: Tell us how you came to be drawn into the world of pragmas.
COMPILER WRITER: Well, it started off with little things. Just a few
boolean flags, a way to turn asserts on and off, debug output, that sort of
thing. I thought, what harm can it do? It's not like I'm doing anything you
couldn't do with command line switches, right? Then it got a little bit
heavier, integer values for optimisation levels, even the odd string or two.
Before I knew it I was doing the real hard stuff, constant expressions,
conditionals, the whole shooting box. Then one day when I put in a hook for
making arbitrary calls into the interpreter, that was when I finally realised I
had a problem...
-- Greg Ewing, 31 Aug 2000
The modules people have built for Python are like the roads the Romans built
through Europe. On this solid ground, you can move fast as you work on aspects
of program design that aren't so analytical -- user interface, multi-threaded
event dispatching models, all kinds of things that can be done a lot of
different ways and are hard to get right the first time through.
-- Donn Cave, 3 Sep 2000
Python 2.0 beta 1 is now available from BeOpen PythonLabs. There is a long list
of new features since Python 1.6, released earlier today. We don't plan on any
new releases in the next 24 hours.
-- Jeremy Hylton, in the 2.0b1 announcement, 5 Sep 2000
Fortunately, you've left that madness behind, and entered the clean, happy, and
safe Python world of transvestite lumberjacks and singing Vikings.
-- Quinn Dunkan, 17 Sep 2000
Regular expressions are among my most valued tools, along with goto, eval,
multiple inheritance, preemptive multithreading, floating point, run-time type
identification, a big knife, a bottle of bleach, and 120VAC electricity. All of
these things suck sometimes.
-- Kragen Sitaker, 27 Sep 2000
IIRC, he didn't much care for regexps before, but actually writing a regexp
engine drives most people who do it to intense hatred.
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