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the calling namespace (except when written by Steve Majewski :-).
      -- Guido van Rossum, 1 Aug 1994

    I don't know a lot about this artificial life stuff -- but I'm suspicious
of anything Newsweek gets goofy about -- and I suspect its primary use is as
another money extraction tool to be applied by ai labs to the department of
defense (and more power to 'em).
    Nevertheless in wondering why free software is so good these days it
occurred to me that the propagation of free software is one gigantic artificial
life evolution experiment, but the metaphor isn't perfect.
    Programs are thrown out into the harsh environment, and the bad ones die.
The good ones adapt rapidly and become very robust in short order.
    The only problem with the metaphor is that the process isn't random at all.
Python *chooses* to include Tk's genes; Linux decides to make itself more
suitable for symbiosis with X, etcetera.
    Free software is artificial life, but better.
      -- Aaron Watters, 29 Sep 1994

I claim complete innocence and ignorance! It must have been Tim. I wouldn't
know a Trondheim Hammer if it fell on my foot!
      -- Steve Majewski, 10 Jan 1995

(Aieee! Yet another thing on my TODO pile!)
      -- A.M. Kuchling, 10 Jan 1995

[After someone wrote "...assignment capability, a la djikstra"] Ehh, the poor
old man's name is Dijkstra. I should know, "ij" is a well known digraph in the
Dutch language. And before someone asks the obvious: his famous "P and V" names
for semaphores are derived for the Dutch words "Passeer" and "Verlaat", or
"Pass" and "Leave". And no, I haven't met him (although he did work at CWI back
in the fifties when it was called, as it should still be today, Mathematical
Centre). he currently lives in Austin, Texas I believe. (While we're at it...
does anybody remember the Dijkstra font for Macintoshes? It was a scanned
version of his handwriting. I believe Luca Cardelli scanned it -- the author of
Obliq, a somewhat Python-like distributed language built on Modula-3. I could
go on forever... :-)
      -- Guido van Rossum, 19 Jan 1995

As always, I'll leave it to a volunteer to experiment with this.
      -- Guido van Rossum, 20 Jan 1995

Non-masochists, please delete this article NOW.
      -- Aaron Watters, 20 Jan 1995

If Perl weren't around, I'd probably be using Python right now.
      -- Tom Christiansen in comp.lang.perl, 2 Jun 1995

GUI stuff is *supposed* to be hard. It builds character.
      -- Jim Ahlstrom, at one of the early Python workshops

    >VERY cool mod, Peter. I'll be curious to see GvR's reaction to your
syntax.
    Hm.
      -- Nick Seidenman and Guido van Rossum, 1 Aug 1996

Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom
and nobody can read another's code; too little and expressiveness is
endangered.
      -- Guido van Rossum, 13 Aug 1996

[On regression testing] Another approach is to renounce all worldly goods and
retreat to a primitive cabin in Montana, where you can live a life of purity,
unpolluted by technological change. But now and then you can send out little
packages....
      -- Aaron Watters

Ah, you're a recent victim of forceful evangelization. Write your own assert
module, use it, and come back in a few months to tell me whether it really
caught 90% of your bugs.
      -- Guido van Rossum, 7 Feb 1997

The larger scientific computing centers generally have a "theory" division and
a "actually uses the computer" <wink> division. The theory division generally
boasts some excellent theoreticians and designers, while the other division
generally boasts some excellent physical scientists who simply want to get
their work done. In most labs I've seen, the two divisions hate each others'
guts (or, rarely, blissfully ignore each other), & the politics is so thick you
float on it even after they embed your feet in cement blocks (hence even the
simple relief of death is denied you <wink>).
      -- Tim Peters, 25 Mar 1997

In one particular way the conflict is fundamental & eternal: the "working
scientists" generally understand the hardware du jour perfectly, and
passionately resent any attempt to prevent them from fiddling with it directly
-- while the theory folks are forever inventing new ways to hide the hardware
du jour. That two groups can both be so right and so wrong at the same time is
my seventh proof for the existence of God ...
      -- Tim Peters, 25 Mar 1997

You're going to be in a minority - you're coming to Python programming from a
language which offers you a lot more in the way of comfortable operations than
Python, instead of coming from medieval torture chambers like C or Fortran,
which offer so much less.
      -- Andrew Mullhaupt, 26 Jun 1997

...although Python uses an obsolete approach to memory management, it is a
*good* implementation of that approach, as opposed to S, which uses a
combination of bad implementation and demented design decisions to arrive at
what may very well be the worst memory behavior of any actually useful program.
      -- Andrew Mullhaupt, 26 Jun 1997

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

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

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.
    if-anybody's-found-don-beaudry's-sucker-button-let-me-know ly 'yrs
      -- Gordon McMillan, 16 Oct 1998

To my battle-scarred mind, documentation is never more than a hint. Read it
once with disbelief suspended, and then again with full throttle skepticism.
      -- Gordon McMillan, 19 Oct 1998

    Then let the record show that I hereby formally lobby for such an
optimization! I'd lay out some arguments, except that it's already implemented
<wink>.
    well-*that*-one-went-easy-ly y'rs - tim
      -- Tim Peters, 20 Oct 1998

We did requirements and task analysis, iterative design, and user testing.
You'd almost think programming languages were an interface between people and
computers.
      -- Steven Pemberton, one of the designers of Python's direct ancestor
         ABC

Not at all, although I agree here too <wink>. It's like saying a fork is broken
just because it's not that handy for jacking up a car. That is, Guido
implemented the syntax to support default arguments, and it works great for
that purpose! Using it to fake closures is a hack, and the "hey, this is cool!"
/ "hey, this really sucks!" mixed reaction thus follows, much as pain follows a
car falling on your skull. Stick to stabbing peas, or even teensy pea-sized
closures, and a fork serves very well.
      -- Tim Peters, 31 Oct 1998

My customers consider it a marketable skill that I a) think for myself b) share
my thoughts with them.
      -- Paul Prescod, 2 Nov 1998

    Anyone else know what a Stanley #45 plane is? ... it's not what you use if
you aren't looking to produce intricate moldings. If you want to make a
tabletop flat, and bring out the natural beauty of the wood, you use a big,
long and flat bench plane. The beauty is in the wood, not the tool, the tool is
just the right one to let you see that and to let others see it too.
    And that's a very impressive kind of beauty in itself, isn't it? The kind
of beauty some say is homely--an uninteresting face, boring angles, few if any
parts, no curly flowers. It's just a tool, and not beautiful at all. But look,
that tool makes beauty. It makes it *easy* to make beautiful things, to see
deep into the the grain of whatever material you're working.
    Maybe it gets us a little closer to art.
      -- Ivan Van Laningham, 3 Nov 1998

You might think "That's illegal." That's not illegal; that's *cool*.
      -- Paul Dubois at IPC7, on recursive template definitions in C++

This supports reflection, which is the 90s way of writing self- modifying code.
      -- John Aycock at IPC7, during his parsing talk

It turns out that docstrings are the only way to associate information with
functions, which is what led you to abuse them in such a fascinating and
stomach-churning way.
      -- Jim Hugunin at IPC7, on embedding BNF parsing rules in docstrings

    "The Mayans looked on the integers as gods."
    "What did the Mayans think of integer division?"
      -- Ivan Van Laningham and an unknown audience member at IPC7

Y2K problem? The Mayans didn't have a *millennium*-2K problem!
      -- Eric S. Raymond at IPC7, on learning that the Mayan calendar takes
         28 octillion years to wrap around

"Generic identifier" -- think about it too much and your head explodes.
      -- Sean McGrath at IPC7, discussing SGML terminology

Nothing I've ever written has reached 1.0.
      -- Greg Ward at IPC7, on using small version numbers

Well, that's a little thing -- the specification.
      -- Guido van Rossum at IPC7

    "We've got a name (Module Distribution Utilities) that gives us a good

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

Make this IDLE version 0.8. (We have to skip 0.7 because that was a CNRI
release in a corner of the basement of a government building on a planet
circling Aldebaran.)
      -- GvR, in a CVS commit message, 22 Mar 2001

Python: programming the way Guido indented it.
      -- Digital Creations T-shirt slogan at IPC9

Stackless Python: programming the way Guido prevented it.
      -- Christian Tismer's title slide, at IPC9

I don't think we should use rational numbers for money because money isn't
rational.
      -- Moshe Zadka, at IPC9

We can't stop people from complaining but we can influence what they complain
about.
      -- Tim Peters, at IPC9

Perl is like vise grips. You can do anything with it but it is the wrong tool
for every job.
      -- Bruce Eckel, at IPC9

Given the choice between a good text editor and a good source control system,
i'll take the source control, and use "cat" to write my code.
      -- Greg Wilson, at IPC9

here's the eff-bot's favourite lambda refactoring rule:
1) write a lambda function
2) write a comment explaining what the heck that lambda does
3) study the comment for a while, and think of a name that captures
   the essence of the comment
4) convert the lambda to a def statement, using that name
5) remove the comment
      -- Fredrik Lundh, 01 Apr 2001

The GPL tried to protect the freedom of end-users to modify and redistribute
their code. Most people do not believe that this is a legitimate freedom like
freedom of speech or assembly but Richard Stallman does. I don't think that
there is an argument that that will persuade a person one way or another. If
freedoms could be proven, that famous document would probably start: "Not
everyone holds these truths to be self-evident, so we've worked up a proof of
them as Appendix A."
      -- Paul Prescod, 11 Apr 2001

That is one of the first goals. Also, we want to handle a C++ SAX stream with
Python, and vice versa (feed a Python SAX stream into Xalan). Bi-SAXuality, in
a sense. :)
      -- Jürgen Hermann, 11 Apr 2001

As you seem totally unwilling or unable to understand that _Weltanschauung_ to
any extent, I don't see how you could bring Python any constructive enhancement
(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

IMO a bunch of the frustration I sometimes feel with Python comes from its
originally being intended as a "glue" language. It's too good for that, and
finds itself used as a work horse or even a race horse. Neither type of horse
belongs in the glue factory ;-).
      -- Paul Rubin, 30 Oct 2001

    "Which inevitably has the followup rhyme 'There was a young man from
Verdun'."
    "But somehow no one ever seems to be able to remember what it was about the
man from Abdero."
      -- Simon Callan and Gareth McCaughan, 04 Nov 2001, after someone
         quoted the limerick "There was a young man from Wooloomooloo /
         Whose limericks always finished on line two."

Sometimes I feel like I'm reinventing Zope, but at least it's a Zope I
understand.
      -- Quinn Dunkan, 05 Nov 2001 on the quixote-users list

Homological algebra beckons -- brain relief in this context!
      -- Michael Hudson, 07 Nov 2001, in a discussion of Stackless Python

If you're talking "useful", I'm not your bot.
      -- Tim Peters, 08 Nov 2001

    "How do you do a range of floats?"
    "Bring flowers, and buy them all nice dinners. Try not to be *too* obvious