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/* This algorithm is from a book written before the invention of structured
programming... */
      -- Comment in parser/pgen.c, noted by Michael Hudson

For more information please see my unpublished manuscript on steam driven
turing machines. [2000pp in crayon donated to the harvard library -- they never
told me whether they filed it under mathematics, philosophy, logic, mechanical
engineering, or computational science]
      -- Aaron Watters, 12 May 2000

    Me? I hate the whole lambda calculus, not because of what it is, but
because of what many people think it is. They think that it's the whole of
computer science, the ultimate way to express and reason about programs, when
in reality it's merely a shabby and incomplete model of how Fortran fails to
work. The first thing SICP has to do is teach everyone how bad the lambda
calculus model is -- as part of teaching them about a language allegedly based
on lambda calculus.
    I'm sorry, was my bias showing again? :-)
      -- William Tanksley, 13 May 2000

I never got beyond starting the data-structures in C++, I never got beyond
seeing how it would work in Scheme. I finished it in one Python -filled
afternoon, and discovered the idea sucked big time. I was glad I did it in
Python, because it only cost me one afternoon to discover the idea sucks.
      -- Moshe Zadka, 13 May 2000

In truth, we use 'j' to represent sqrt(-1) for exactly the same reason we use a
convention for the direction of current which is exactly the opposite of the
direction the electrons actually travel: because it drives physicists crazy.
(And if we pick up a few mathematicians or whatever along the way, well, that's
just gravy. ;-)
      -- Grant R. Griffin, 14 May 2000

Unicode: everyone wants it, until they get it.
      -- Barry Warsaw, 16 May 2000

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