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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
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
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
-- Tim Peters, 24 Sep 1998
<shakes head ruefully> You kids today, with your piercings and your big pants
and your purple-and-green hair and your X-Files and your Paula Cole and your
espresso coffee and your Seattle grunge rock and your virtual machines and your
acid-washed jeans and your Ernest Hemingway and your object-oriented languages
and your fax machines and your hula hoops and your zoot suits and your strange
slang phrases like "That's so bogus" or "What a shocking bad hat" and those
atonal composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Milton Babbit that you kids seem to
like these days and your cubist painters and your Ally McBeal and that guy in
Titanic and your TCP/IP protocol and your heads filled with all that Cartesian
dualism these days and ... well, I just don't get you kids. <shakes head
ruefully again>
-- A.M. Kuchling, 1 Oct 1998
E.g., at the REBOL prompt I typed
send tim@email.msn.com "Did this work?"
and in response it dialed my modem, connected to my ISP, and then REBOL
crashed after provoking an invalid page fault in kernel32.dll. Then my
connection broke, and the modem dialed and connected again. Then it just sat
there until it timed out.
now-*that's*-user-friendly<wink>-ly y'rs
-- Tim Peters, 24 Sep 1998
I've reinvented the idea of variables and types as in a programming language,
something I do on every project.
-- Greg Ward, September 1998
"The event/tree dualism reminds me why I always wanted to be able to do
pattern matching on trees."
"'Honey, what is this guy doing up there?' 'Oh, I suppose it's Christian,
trying to match some patterns.' "
-- Christian Tismer and Dirk Heise, 12 Oct 1998
Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.
-- Larry Wall, 14 Oct 1998
"What's the opinion of the (wink) Python luminaries?"
"The last time I saw a position paper from them, they came out strongly
against the suggestion that old people be put on ice floes and left to drift
out to sea to die.
they-never-like-*any*-of-my-ideas-ly y'rs"
-- Stuart Hungerford and Tim Peters, 14 Oct 1998
Rather than borrowing from our beauty-impaired ugly sibling, why not look at
Java, the beautiful, conceited sister? We could have something more like
JavaDoc.
-- Paul Prescod, 18 Oct 1998
It won't work. This is far too concrete a problem to interest Tim. I see 3
possible approaches:
1) Claim that Python can't do a <some random combination of 'L', 'R', 'A'>
grammar. This will yield an irate response from Aaron which will draw Tim into
it and you'll get a solution in 3 months after lots of entertaining posts.
2) Turn it into an optimization problem and get a solution from Marc- Andre
using mxTextTools next week.
3) Turn it into an obfuscation problem and get competing solutions from
Greg Stein and Fredrik tomorrow morning.
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
doing. Chances are that you will see the wrong thing(s) before the other person
has said anything... I just stick a picture of a face on my monitor and talk to
it to find bugs.
-- Richard van de Stadt, 9 Apr 1999
Might just be nostalgia, but I think I would give an arm or two to get that
(not necessarily my own, though).
-- Fredrik Lundh, 13 May 1999
1. Beautiful is better than ugly.
2. Explicit is better than implicit.
3. Simple is better than complex.
4. Complex is better than complicated.
5. Flat is better than nested.
6. Sparse is better than dense.
7. Readability counts.
8. Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
9. Although practicality beats purity.
10. Errors should never pass silently.
11. Unless explicitly silenced.
12. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
13. There should be one -- and preferably only one -- obvious way to do it.
14. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
15. Now is better than never.
16. Although never is often better than *right* now.
17. If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
18. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
19. Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
-- Tim Peters' 19 Pythonic Theses, 4 Jun 1999
"However, I've heard that after about 10K items in a dict, it starts having
problems."
"11,523 to be exact. After that, dicts drink to excess and show up for work
late the morning after. We don't like to talk about it, though."
-- Aahz Maruch and Tim Peters, 8 Jun 1999
Stackless Python 0.2, a plug-in replacement for the Python core that does not
use the C stack, has been announced by Christian Tismer as the best way to
prove that it was possible without a major rewrite to the core. Neel
Krishnaswami commented to Christian, "This is very neat, and you are completely
deranged".
-- From Linux Weekly News, 17 Jul 1999
... we need more people like him, who are willing to explore without being
driven to argue with people about it.
-- William Tanksley on Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, 2 Jul 1999
Sorry for the term, I picked it up from Jim Fulton back when it was an
about-to-be-added feature for Principia/Aqueduct. As with so many Fultonisms,
it's vivid and tends to stick in one's (non-pluggable) brain.
-- Paul Everitt on the term "pluggable brains", 5 Jul 1999
I picture a lump of inanimate flesh (a result from a relational database query)
being infused with the spark of life (object behavior, aka class).
-- Jim Fulton on the term "pluggable brains", 5 Jul 1999
This is good. It means that while Ionesco is dead, his spirit lives on.
-- Gordon McMillan on how Windows attaches meaning to 3-character
file extensions, 30 Jul 1999
(On the statement print "42 monkeys"+"1 snake") BTW, both Perl and Python get
this wrong. Perl gives 43 and Python gives "42 monkeys1 snake", when the answer
is clearly "41 monkeys and 1 fat snake".
-- Jim Fulton, 10 Aug 1999
I expect that what you really object to is the absence of control structures
other than goto, and the LT/GE/etc spelling of comparison operators. That was
common enough in its day, and even by the time Pascal came around the keypunch
I used still didn't have a semicolon key. It looks ugly in retrospect only
because it is <wink>.
-- Tim Peters on SNOBOL4, 17 Aug 1999
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
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
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.
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
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