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(except perhaps by some random mechanism akin to monkeys banging away on
typewriters until 'Hamlet' comes out, I guess).
      -- Alex Martelli, 17 Apr 2001

    "Are we more likely to add different concrete subclasses of Consumable in
the future, or different concrete subclasses of Consumer? I suspect the former
is more likely."
    "With genetic engineering being the latest growth industry, I'm not sure
that's true. Although I expect that any new models of cow, etc. will have a
backwards compatible food-consumption protocol."
      -- Alex Martelli and Greg Ewing, 19 Apr 2001

This property is called confluence, and the proof is called the Church -Rosser
theorem. I'm sure you know this, of course, but somewhere out there there's a
college student who is being shocked that CS is actually turning out to be
relevant, for sufficiently small values of relevance.
      -- Neelakantan Krishnaswami, 20 Apr 2001

if the style mafia finds out, you may find a badly severed list comprehension
in your bed one morning, but I'd say the risk is very low.
      -- Fredrik Lundh, 10 May 2001

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