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After writing CGI scripts the traditional way for a few years, it is taking
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.

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

      -- Gordon McMillan, 18 Nov 1998

    If Python strays into trying to be something completely new it will fail,
like Scheme, K and Smalltalk. There are both technical and sociological reasons
for this. If you stray too far technically, you make mistakes: either you make
modelling mistakes because you don't have an underlying logical model (i.e. C++
inheritance) or you make interface mistakes because you don't understand how
your new paradigm will be used by real programmers.
    Let research languages innovate. Python integrates.
      -- Paul Prescod, 21 Nov 1998

    "I got a little mad at the way python polynomials were written -- the code
looked like its author knew neither polynomials nor Python."
    "That would be me :-)."
      -- Moshe Zadka and Guido van Rossum, 22 Nov 1998

I would recommend not wasting any more time on the naming issue. (This is a
recurring theme in my posts -- remember, I spent about 0.3 microseconds
thinking about whether "Python" would be a good name for a programming
language, and I've never regretted it.)
      -- Guido van Rossum, 25 Nov 1998

    "My course members are almost all coming from Math, and the first question
was 'why isn't it complete?' Just a matter of elegance."
    "Oh, don't worry. My background is math. This is actually good for them --
like discovering that Santa Claus doesn't really exist."
      -- Christian Tismer and Guido van Rossum, 2 Dec 1998

One of my cheap entertainments is axiomatizing characterizations of [Tim
Peters]. I think I've come up with a minimal one: the only c.l.p poster more
concerned with working non-legal code than non-working legal code.
      -- Cameron Laird, 2 Dec 1998

PYTHON = (P)rogrammers (Y)earning (T)o (H)omestead (O)ur (N)oosphere.
      -- 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

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

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
simpleton. Oh wait! Let me guess! I have to spell it out for you, you festering
wombat boil. You can't divide integers by integers and get integers. Understand
now? Now go out there and don't do it. And read Herstein, while you're at it.
      -- Johann Hibschman, 4 Mar 2000

Actually, I believe you understand me fine, you'd just rather not believe it: