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calling namespace (except when written by Steve Majewski :-).</p>
<p class='source'>Guido van Rossum, 1 Aug 1994</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q21'>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 <em>chooses</em> to include
Tk's genes; Linux decides to make itself more suitable for
symbiosis with X, etcetera. Free software is artificial life, but
better.</p>
<p class='source'>Aaron Watters, 29 Sep 1994</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q22'>I claim complete innocence and
ignorance! It must have been Tim. I wouldn't know a Trondheim
Hammer if it fell on my foot!</p>
<p class='source'>Steve Majewski, 10 Jan 1995</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q23'>(Aieee! Yet another thing on my TODO
pile!)</p>
<p class='source'>A.M. Kuchling, 10 Jan 1995</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q24'>[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... :-)</p>
<p class='source'>Guido van Rossum, 19 Jan 1995</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q25'>As always, I'll leave it to a
volunteer to experiment with this.</p>
<p class='source'>Guido van Rossum, 20 Jan 1995</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q26'>Non-masochists, please delete this
article NOW.</p>
<p class='source'>Aaron Watters, 20 Jan 1995</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q27'>If Perl weren't around, I'd probably
be using Python right now.</p>
<p class='source'>Tom Christiansen, in comp.lang.perl 2 Jun
1995</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q28'>GUI stuff is <em>supposed</em> to be
hard. It builds character.</p>
<p class='source'>Jim Ahlstrom, at one of the early Python
workshops</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q29'>&gt;VERY cool mod, Peter. I'll be
curious to see GvR's reaction to your syntax. Hm.</p>
<p class='source'>Nick Seidenman and Guido van Rossum, 1 Aug
1996</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q30'>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.</p>
<p class='source'>Guido van Rossum, 13 Aug 1996</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q31'>[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....</p>
<p class='source'>Aaron Watters</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q32'>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.</p>
<p class='source'>Guido van Rossum, 7 Feb 1997</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q33'>The larger scientific computing
centers generally have a "theory" division and a "actually uses the
computer" &lt;wink&gt; 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), &amp; 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 &lt;wink&gt;).</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 25 Mar 1997</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q34'>In one particular way the conflict is
fundamental &amp; 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
...</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 25 Mar 1997</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q35'>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.</p>
<p class='source'>Andrew Mullhaupt, 26 Jun 1997</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q36'>...although Python uses an obsolete
approach to memory management, it is a <em>good</em> 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.</p>
<p class='source'>Andrew Mullhaupt, 26 Jun 1997</p>
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