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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
bottlenecks in a faster language. The secret to large systems is to prototype
and prototype, until you've got clean separation of the system into managable
pieces, then code in whatever language most suits the need of each piece.
      -- Gordon McMillan, 15 Dec 1999

When Jim [Fulton] says "tricky" it means your brain could explode.
      -- Michel Pelletier, 15 Dec 1999

You have start-tags, attributes, end-tags and character data. We have all seen
"XML applications" and "XML parsers" which handle this gang- of-four concepts.
... Now we can peer over the parapet and shout "your parser smells of
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