ACME-QuoteDB
view release on metacpan or search on metacpan
chmod($perms, $db);
}
EOF
my $builder = $class->new(
module_name => 'ACME::QuoteDB',
license => 'perl',
dist_author => 'David Wright <david_v_wright@yahoo.com>',
dist_version_from => 'lib/ACME/QuoteDB.pm',
build_requires => {
#'Module::Build' => '0.33',
'Module::Build' => '0.280801',
'Test::More' => 0.8,
'Readonly' => 1.03,
'Data::Dumper' => 2.121,
'Carp' => 1.04,
#'criticism' => 1.02,
'version' => 0.70,
'aliased' => 0.22,
'File::Basename' => 2.74,
0.1.2 Wed Sep 30 23:26:11 PDT 2009
bug fixes:
* Build.PL install changes - SQLite3 could not actually write to the database,
even though, the db file was world writeable. The container dir
also needs to be writable, now it is.
* ensure the database is 0666 for tests as well
0.1.1 Fri Sep 18 02:11:02 PDT 2009
bug fixes:
* default constructor values were not getting set on the object as they should
* loosen untaint filepath - for the dist test failures
0.1.0 Wed Sep 9 23:43:56 PDT 2009
Initial public pre-release (minor version)
---
name: ACME-QuoteDB
version: 0.1.2
author:
- 'David Wright <david_v_wright@yahoo.com>'
abstract: 'API implements CRUD for a Collection of Quotes (adages/proverbs/sayings/epigrams, etc)'
license: perl
resources:
license: http://dev.perl.org/licenses/
build_requires:
Carp: 1.04
Class::DBI: 3.0.17
Cwd: 3.25
DBD::SQLite: 1.14
Data::Dumper: 2.121
File::Basename: 2.74
File::Copy: 2.11
File::Spec: 3.2501
HTML::TokeParser: 2.37
Module::Build: 0.280801
Makefile.PL view on Meta::CPAN
# Note: this file was auto-generated by Module::Build::Compat version 0.2808_01
unless (eval "use Module::Build::Compat 0.02; 1" ) {
print "This module requires Module::Build to install itself.\n";
require ExtUtils::MakeMaker;
my $yn = ExtUtils::MakeMaker::prompt
(' Install Module::Build now from CPAN?', 'y');
unless ($yn =~ /^y/i) {
die " *** Cannot install without Module::Build. Exiting ...\n";
}
require Cwd;
ACME::QuoteDB − API implements CRUD for a Collection of Quotes
(adages/proverbs/sayings/epigrams, etc)
This module provides an easy to use programmitic interface to a dataâ€
base (sqlite3 or mysql) of ’quotes’. (any content really, that can fit
into our "defined format")
For simplicty you can think of it as a modern fancy perl version of
fortune (with a management interface, remote database connection supâ€
port, plus additional features and some not (yet) supported)
Supported actions include: (CRUD)
1 Create
* Adding quote(s)
* ’Batch’ Loading quotes from a file (stream, other database, etc)
1 Read
* Displaying a single quote, random or based on some criteria
* Displaying multiple quotes, based on some criteria
lib/ACME/QuoteDB.pm view on Meta::CPAN
# push @{ $quotes_ref }, $q_obj->quote . "\n-- $attr_name";
#}
#return _get_quote_ref_from_all(\@q);
# XXX array_ref does not work here!
return _get_quote_ref_from_all(@q);
#return $quotes_ref;
}
sub _get_quote_ref_from_all {
my (@results) = @_;
#my ($results) = @_;
my $quotes_ref = [];
#foreach my $q_obj ( @{$results} ){
foreach my $q_obj ( @results ){
next unless $q_obj->quote;
my $rec = Attr->retrieve($q_obj->attr_id);
my $attr_name = $rec->name || q{};
push @{ $quotes_ref }, $q_obj->quote . "\n-- $attr_name";
}
return $quotes_ref;
}
sub _args_are_valid {
lib/ACME/QuoteDB.pm view on Meta::CPAN
=head1 DESCRIPTION
This module provides an easy to use programmitic interface
to a database (sqlite3 or mysql) of 'quotes'. (any content really,
that can fit into our L<"defined format"|/"record format">)
For simplicty you can think of it as a modern fancy perl version
of L<fortune|/fortune>
(with a management interface, remote database
connection support,
plus additional features and some not (yet) supported)
Originally, this module was designed for a collection of quotes from a well
known TV show, once I became aware that distributing it as such would be
L<copyright infringement|/'copyright infringement'>, I generalized the module, so it can be loaded
with 'any' content. (in the quote-ish L<format|/"record format">)
=head4 Supported actions include: (CRUD)
=over 4
lib/ACME/QuoteDB.pm view on Meta::CPAN
-- Ralph Wiggums
# returns all quotes attributed to 'ralph', with a rating between
# (and including) 7 to 9
print join "\n", @{$sq->get_quotes({
AttrName => 'ralph',
Rating => '7-9'
})
};
# same thing but limit to 2 results returned
# (and including) 7 to 9
print join "\n", @{$sq->get_quotes({
AttrName => 'ralph',
Rating => '7-9',
Limit => 2
})
};
# get 6 random quotes (any attribution)
foreach my $q ( @{$sq->get_quotes({Limit => 6})} ) {
print "$q\n";
}
# get list of available attributions (that have quotes provided by this module)
print $sq->list_attr_names;
# any unique part of name will work
# i.e these will all return the same results (because of our limited
# quotes db data set)
print $sq->get_quotes({AttrName => 'comic book guy'});
print $sq->get_quotes({AttrName => 'comic book'});
print $sq->get_quotes({AttrName => 'comic'});
print $sq->get_quotes({AttrName => 'book'});
print $sq->get_quotes({AttrName => 'book guy'});
print $sq->get_quotes({AttrName => 'guy'});
# get all quotes, only using these categories (you have defined)
print @{$sq->get_quotes({ Category => [qw(Humor ROTFLMAO)] })};
lib/ACME/QuoteDB.pm view on Meta::CPAN
Note: The 'Rating' option is very subjective.
It's a 0-10 scale of 'quality' (or whatever you decide it is)
To get a list of the available AttrNames use the list_attr_names method
listed below.
Any unique part of name will work
Example, for attribution 'comic book guy'
# these will all return the same results
print $sq->get_quotes({AttrName => 'comic book guy'});
print $sq->get_quotes({AttrName => 'comic book'});
print $sq->get_quotes({AttrName => 'comic'});
print $sq->get_quotes({AttrName => 'book'});
print $sq->get_quotes({AttrName => 'book guy'});
print $sq->get_quotes({AttrName => 'guy'});
# However, keep in mind the less specific the request is the more results
# are returned, for example the last one would match, 'Comic Book Guy',
# 'Buddy Guy' and 'Guy Smiley',...
=begin comment
# XXX this is a bug with sub _get_attribution_ids_from_name
#print $sq->get_quotes({AttrName => 'guy'}); would not match 'Guy Smiley'
=end comment
lib/ACME/QuoteDB.pm view on Meta::CPAN
# (and including) 7 to 9
print join "\n", @{$sq->get_quotes({
AttrName => 'ralph',
Rating => '7-9',
Limit => 2
})
};
AttrName and Rating work exactely the same as for get_quote (docs above)
Limit specifies the amout of results you would like returned. (just like
with SQL)
=head2 get_quotes_contain
returns zero or more quote(s), based on a basic text search.
# get specific quote based on basic text search.
# search all ralph wiggum quotes for string 'wookie'
print $sq->get_quotes_contain({
lib/ACME/QuoteDB.pm view on Meta::CPAN
be happy down the road). Instead use $self->get_record('name') (getter) or
$self->set_record(name => 'my attrib') (setter)
When we are using a SQLite database backend ('regular' local usage), we
should probably be using, ORLite instead of Class::DBI
(although we have not seen any issues yet).
Please report any bugs or feature requests to C<bug-acme-quotedb at rt.cpan.org>, or through
the web interface at L<http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=ACME-QuoteDB>.
I will be notified, and then you'll automatically be notified of progress on your bug as I make changes.
=head1 SUPPORT
You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.
perldoc ACME::QuoteDB
You can also look for information at:
lib/ACME/QuoteDB.pm view on Meta::CPAN
=head1 ERRATA
Q: Why did you put it in the ACME namespace?
A: Seemed appropriate. I emailed modules@cpan.org and didn't get a
different reaction.
Q: Why did you write this?
A: At a past company, a team I worked on a project with had a test suite,
in which at the completion of successful tests (100%), a 'wisenheimer'
success message would be printed. (Like a quote or joke or the like)
(Interestingly, it added a 'fun' factor to testing, not that one is needed
of course ;). It was hard to justify spending company time to find and
add decent content to the hand rolled process, this would have helped.
Q: Don't you have anything better to do, like some non-trivial work?
A: Yup
Q: Hey Dood! why are u uzing Class::DBI as your ORM!? Haven't your heard
of L<DBIx::Class>?
A: Yup, and I'm aware of 'the new hotness' L<Rose::DB>. If you use this
module and are unhappy with the ORM, feel free to change it.
lib/ACME/QuoteDB.pm view on Meta::CPAN
=item fortune
unix application in 'games' (FreeBSD) type 'man fortune' from the command line
=item copyright infringement
L<http://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/is-it-copyright-trademark-infringement-to-operate--72508.html>
=item wikiquote
interesting reading, wikiquote fair use doc: L<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquote:Copyrights>
=back
=head1 LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT
Copyright 2009 David Wright, all rights reserved.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
=cut
1; # End of ACME::QuoteDB
lib/ACME/QuoteDB/DB/Attribution.pm view on Meta::CPAN
L<Class::DBI>
=head1 AUTHOR
David Wright, C<< <david_v_wright at yahoo.com> >>
=head1 BUGS AND LIMITATIONS
Please report any bugs or feature requests to C<bug-acme-thesimpsonsquotes at rt.cpan.org>, or through
the web interface at L<http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=ACME-QuoteDB>. I will be notified, and then you'll
automatically be notified of progress on your bug as I make changes.
=head1 SUPPORT
You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.
perldoc ACME::QuoteDB
You can also look for information at:
lib/ACME/QuoteDB/DB/Attribution.pm view on Meta::CPAN
=item * Search CPAN
L<http://search.cpan.org/dist/ACME-QuoteDB/>
=back
=head1 LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT
Copyright 2009 David Wright, all rights reserved.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
lib/ACME/QuoteDB/DB/Category.pm view on Meta::CPAN
L<Class::DBI>
=head1 AUTHOR
David Wright, C<< <david_v_wright at yahoo.com> >>
=head1 BUGS AND LIMITATIONS
Please report any bugs or feature requests to C<bug-acme-thesimpsonsquotes at rt.cpan.org>, or through
the web interface at L<http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=ACME-QuoteDB>. I will be notified, and then you'll
automatically be notified of progress on your bug as I make changes.
=head1 SUPPORT
You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.
perldoc ACME::QuoteDB
You can also look for information at:
lib/ACME/QuoteDB/DB/Category.pm view on Meta::CPAN
=item * Search CPAN
L<http://search.cpan.org/dist/ACME-QuoteDB/>
=back
=head1 LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT
Copyright 2009 David Wright, all rights reserved.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
lib/ACME/QuoteDB/DB/DBI.pm view on Meta::CPAN
L<Class::DBI>;
=head1 AUTHOR
David Wright, C<< <david_v_wright at yahoo.com> >>
=head1 BUGS AND LIMITATIONS
Please report any bugs or feature requests to C<bug-acme-thesimpsonsquotes at rt.cpan.org>, or through
the web interface at L<http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=ACME-QuoteDB>. I will be notified, and then you'll
automatically be notified of progress on your bug as I make changes.
=head1 SUPPORT
You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.
perldoc ACME::QuoteDB
You can also look for information at:
lib/ACME/QuoteDB/DB/DBI.pm view on Meta::CPAN
L<http://search.cpan.org/dist/ACME-QuoteDB/>
=back
=head1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
=head1 LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT
Copyright 2009 David Wright, all rights reserved.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
lib/ACME/QuoteDB/DB/Quote.pm view on Meta::CPAN
L<Class::DBI>
=head1 AUTHOR
David Wright, C<< <david_v_wright at yahoo.com> >>
=head1 BUGS AND LIMITATIONS
Please report any bugs or feature requests to C<bug-acme-thesimpsonsquotes at rt.cpan.org>, or through
the web interface at L<http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=ACME-QuoteDB>. I will be notified, and then you'll
automatically be notified of progress on your bug as I make changes.
=head1 SUPPORT
You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.
perldoc ACME::QuoteDB
You can also look for information at:
lib/ACME/QuoteDB/DB/Quote.pm view on Meta::CPAN
=item * Search CPAN
L<http://search.cpan.org/dist/ACME-QuoteDB/>
=back
=head1 LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT
Copyright 2009 David Wright, all rights reserved.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
lib/ACME/QuoteDB/DB/QuoteCatg.pm view on Meta::CPAN
L<Class::DBI>
=head1 AUTHOR
David Wright, C<< <david_v_wright at yahoo.com> >>
=head1 BUGS AND LIMITATIONS
Please report any bugs or feature requests to C<bug-acme-thesimpsonsquotes at rt.cpan.org>, or through
the web interface at L<http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=ACME-QuoteDB>. I will be notified, and then you'll
automatically be notified of progress on your bug as I make changes.
=head1 SUPPORT
You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.
perldoc ACME::QuoteDB
You can also look for information at:
lib/ACME/QuoteDB/DB/QuoteCatg.pm view on Meta::CPAN
=item * Search CPAN
L<http://search.cpan.org/dist/ACME-QuoteDB/>
=back
=head1 LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT
Copyright 2009 David Wright, all rights reserved.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
lib/ACME/QuoteDB/LoadDB.pm view on Meta::CPAN
}) or croak $!;
}
}
}
# confirmation?
# TODO add a test for failure
if ($self->{write_db} and not $attr_id) {croak 'db write not successful'}
#$self->set_record(undef);
$self->{record} = {};
$self->_reset_orig_args;
if ($self->{write_db}) {
$self->success(1);
}
return $self->success;
}
sub _reset_orig_args {
my ($self) = @_;
$self->{record}->{rating} = $self->{orig_args}->{rating};
$self->{record}->{name} = $self->{orig_args}->{attr_source};
$self->{record}->{source} = $self->{orig_args}->{attr_source};
if (ref $self->{orig_args}->{category} eq 'ARRAY') {
foreach my $c (@{$self->{orig_args}->{category}}){
push @{$self->{record}->{catg}}, $c;
}
}
lib/ACME/QuoteDB/LoadDB.pm view on Meta::CPAN
file_format => 'csv',
});
$load_db->data_to_db;
if (!$load_db->success){print 'failed'}
=head3 load from any source
If those dont catch your interest, ACME::QuoteDB::LoadDB is sub-classable,
so one can extract data anyway they like and populate the db themselves.
(there is a test that illustrates overriding the stub method, 'dbload')
you need to populate a record data structure:
$self->set_record(quote => q{}); # mandatory
$self->set_record(name => q{}); # mandatory
$self->set_record(source => q{}); # optional but useful
$self->set_record(catg => q{}); # optional but useful
$self->set_record(rating => q{}); # optional but useful
lib/ACME/QuoteDB/LoadDB.pm view on Meta::CPAN
=head4 Operation Related Parameters
=over 4
=item dry_run - optional
do not write to the database. Use with verbose flag to see what would have beed
written.
This can be helpful for testing the outcome of Loading results.
i.e. like to confirm that the parsing of your data is correct
example:
{
dry_run => 1,
verbose => 1
}
lib/ACME/QuoteDB/LoadDB.pm view on Meta::CPAN
will croak with message if not successful
=head2 dbload
if your file format is set to 'html' or 'custom' you must
define this method to do your parsing in a sub class.
Load from html is not supported because there are too many
ways to represt the data. (same with 'custom')
(see tests for examples - there is a test for loading a 'fortune' file format)
One can subclass ACME::QuoteDB::LoadDB and override dbload,
to do our html parsing
=head2 debug_record
dump record (show what is set on the internal data structure)
e.g. Data::Dumper
lib/ACME/QuoteDB/LoadDB.pm view on Meta::CPAN
is undef on failure or if trying a L</dry_run>
=head2 write_record
takes the data structure 'record' '$self->get_record'
(which must exist). checks if attribution name ($self->get_record('name')) exists,
if so, uses existing attribution name, otherwsie creates a new one
Load from html is not supported because there are too many
ways to represt the data. (see tests for examples)
One can subclass ACME::QuoteDB::LoadDB and override dbload,
to do our html parsing
=head2 create_db_tables
create an empty quotes database (with correct tables).
(usually only performed the first time you load data)
lib/ACME/QuoteDB/LoadDB.pm view on Meta::CPAN
=head1 AUTHOR
David Wright, C<< <david_v_wright at yahoo.com> >>
=head1 BUGS AND LIMITATIONS
Please report any bugs or feature requests to C<bug-acme-quotedb-loaddb at rt.cpan.org>, or through
the web interface at L<http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=ACME-QuoteDB::LoadDB>. I will be notified, and then you'll
automatically be notified of progress on your bug as I make changes.
=head1 SUPPORT
You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.
perldoc ACME::QuoteDB::LoadDB
You can also look for information at:
lib/ACME/QuoteDB/LoadDB.pm view on Meta::CPAN
vim
Debian Linux
Mac OSX
The collective wisdom and code of The CPAN
=head1 LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT
Copyright 2009 David Wright, all rights reserved.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
=cut
1; # End of ACME::QuoteDB::LoadDB
t/01-load_quotes.t view on Meta::CPAN
'Chief Wiggum',
'Comic Book Guy',
'Grandpa Simpson',
'Ralph Wiggum',
);
is( $sq->list_attr_names, join("\n", sort(@expected_attribution_list)));
}
{ # load from html is not supported because there are too many
# ways to represt the data.
# this is an example of extracting quotes from html:
# subclass ACME::QuoteDB::LoadDB and override dbload,
# to do our html parsing
package LoadQuoteDBFromHtml;
use base 'ACME::QuoteDB::LoadDB';
use Carp qw/croak/;
use Data::Dumper qw/Dumper/;
use HTML::TokeParser;
sub dbload {
t/01-load_quotes.t view on Meta::CPAN
'John Redford',
'Joseph Strout',
"Kristj\x{E1}n J\x{F3}nsson",
'Larry Wall',
'Mark Jackson',
'Matthew Lewis Carroll Smith',
'Michael Palin',
'Mike Meyer',
'Nick Seidenman and Guido van Rossum',
'Paul Boddie',
'Paul Prescod',
'Paul Winkler',
'Sriram Srinivasan',
'Steve Majewski',
'Steven D. Majewski',
'Tim Berners-Lee',
'Tim Chase',
'Timothy J. Grant and Tim Peters',
'Tim Peters',
'Told by Nick Leaton',
'Tom Christiansen',
t/02-get_quotes.t view on Meta::CPAN
'Grandpa Simpson',
'Ralph Wiggum',
);
is( $sq->list_attr_names, join "\n", sort @expected_attr_name_list);
#warn $sq->get_quote, "\n";
ok $sq->get_quote; # default get random quote
ok $sq->get_quote =~ m{\w+};
{
my $res = $sq->get_quote({AttrName => 'apu'});
if ($res =~ m/apu/xmsgi) {
pass 'ok';
}
else {
fail 'a supposed apu quote, should contain "Apu" within,...';
}
}
{
my $res = $sq->get_quote({AttrName => 'chief wiggum'});
if ($res =~ m/(chief|clancy|wiggum|police|gun|donut)/xmsgi) {
pass 'ok';
}
else {
fail 'a supposed chief wiggum quote,
should contain "chief wiggum" within,...';
}
}
{
my $res = $sq->get_quote({AttrName => 'wiggum'});
if ($res =~ m/(ralph|chief|wiggum)/xmsgi) {
pass 'ok';
}
else {
fail 'a supposed wiggum quote, should
contain "ralph or chief" within,...';
}
}
{
my $q= 'I hope this has taught you kids a lesson: ' .
qq{kids never learn.\n-- Chief Wiggum};
my $res = $sq->get_quote({AttrName => 'Chief Wiggum', Rating => '9.0'});
if ($res && $res eq $q) {
pass 'ok';
}
else {
fail 'quote should be found';
}
}
eval { # param mispelled
$sq->get_quote({Charcter => 'bart'});
};
t/02-get_quotes.t view on Meta::CPAN
eval {
$sq->get_quote({Contain => '4'}); # only avail for 'get_quotes_contain'
};
if ($@) {
pass if $@ =~ m/unsupported argument option passed/;
} else {fail 'should alert user on non existant params' };
# any unique part of name should work
# i.e these should all return the same results
is scalar @{$sq->get_quotes({AttrName => 'comic book guy'})}, 8;
is scalar @{$sq->get_quotes({AttrName => 'comic book'})}, 8;
is scalar @{$sq->get_quotes({AttrName => 'comic'})}, 8;
is scalar @{$sq->get_quotes({AttrName => 'book'})}, 8;
is scalar @{$sq->get_quotes({AttrName => 'book guy'})}, 8;
is scalar @{$sq->get_quotes({AttrName => 'guy'})}, 8;
eval {
$sq->get_quotes({AttrName => 'your momma'});
};
t/02-get_quotes.t view on Meta::CPAN
AttrName => 'comic',
Rating => '7'
})->[0] =~ m/Highlander/;
ok $sq->get_quotes({
AttrName => 'comic',
Rating => '7.0'
})->[0] =~ m/Highlander/;
my $gs = "Big deal! When I was a pup, we got spanked by presidents " .
"'til the cows came home! Grover Cleveland spanked me on " .
"two non-consecutive occasions!\n-- Grandpa Simpson";
is $sq->get_quotes_contain({
Contain => 'til the cow'
})->[0], $gs;
is $sq->get_quotes_contain({
Contain => 'til the cow',
Rating => '1-5',
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
We will perhaps eventually be writing only small modules which are identified
by name as they are used to build larger ones, so that devices like
indentation, rather than delimiters, might become feasible for expressing local
structure in the source language.
-- Donald E. Knuth, "Structured Programming with goto Statements",
Computing Surveys, Vol 6 No 4, Dec. 1974
Python's syntax succeeds in combining the mistakes of Lisp and Fortran. I do
not construe that as progress.
-- Larry Wall, May 12 2004
Some rejected alternate names for "Monty Python's Flying Circus":
1 2 3 / It's Them! / Arthur Megapode's Flying Circus / The Horrible Earnest
Megapode / The Panic Show / The Plastic Mac Show / Ow! It's Colin Plint! /
Vaseline Review / Vaseline Parade / The Keen Show / Brian's Flying Circus / The
Year of the Stoat / Cynthia Fellatio's Flying Circus / Owl Stretching Time /
The Whizzo Easishow! (Guaranteed to last 1/2 hour! Money back if not!)
-- From Kim "Howard" Johnson's _Life Before and After Monty Python_.
It's interesting to contemplate what Python would have been called
if one of these names had been chosen.
Anybody else on the list got an opinion? Should I change the language or not?
-- Guido van Rossum, 28 Dec 1991
in-any-case-the-best-christmas-present-i-got-today!-ly y'rs - tim
-- Tim Peters, 29 Dec 1991 [First occurrence of Tim Peters's long-
phrase-ly idiom.]
but-i'm-not-even-motivated-enough-to-finish-this-sig-
-- Tim Peters, 20 Dec 2000
Ha -- you have done me the favor of underestimating my ignorance <smile>.
-- Tim Peters, 30 Dec 1991
I prefer (all things being equal) regularity/orthogonality and logical
syntax/semantics in a language because there is less to have to remember. (Of
course I *know* all things are NEVER really equal!)
-- Guido van Rossum, 6 Dec 1991
The details of that silly code are irrelevant.
-- Tim Peters, 4 Mar 1992
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
adventure <wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 16 Sep 1993
I've seen Python criticized as "ugly" precisely because it *doesn't* have a
trick-based view of the world. In many ways, it's a dull language, borrowing
solid old concepts from many other languages & styles: boring syntax,
unsurprising semantics, few automatic coercions, etc etc. But that's one of the
things I like about it.
-- Tim Peters, 16 Sep 1993
One of the things that makes it interesting, is exactly how much Guido has
managed to exploit that *one* implementation trick of 'namespaces'.
-- Steven D. Majewski, 17 Sep 1993
Anyone familiar with Modula-3 should appreciate the difference between a
layered approach, with generic Rd/Wr types, and the Python 'C with foam
padding' approach.
-- John Redford, 24 Nov 1993
People simply will not agree on what should and shouldn't be "an error", and
once exception-handling mechanisms are introduced to give people a choice, they
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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.
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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
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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
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-- 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
PSA 1996 Budget
---------------
Income:
$1,093,276.54 'Guido for President'
Campaign Contributions(1)
$ 3.12 Milk Money Extortion Program
$ 2,934.07 PSA Memberships
-------------
$1,096,213.73 Total Income
Expenses:
$ 652,362.55 Monty Python Licencing Fees (2)
$ 10,876.45 Pre-Release 2 Week Vacations (3)
$ 369,841.59 Post-Release 2 Week Vacations (3)
$ 15.01 Alien Abduction Insurance
$ 62,541.72 Python Web Site Maintenance
$ 554.65 Great Comfort Cream
-------------
$1,096,191.97 Total Expenses
$ (21.76) Total Profit (Loss)
Notes:
(1) Many of you many not be aware of the fabulously successful 'Guido for
President' Campaign. While Guido has no interest in being the president, the
PSA thought it would be a cool way to collect money. The centerpiece of the
campaign featured an attractive offer to spend the night in Guido's spare
bedroom in exchange for a $50,000.00 contribution. (Mark Lutz stayed TWICE!)
(2) Since the proliferation of Monty Python related names (Python, Monty,
Grail, Eric-the-Half-a-Compiler, et al.) has increased over the past year, the
PSA felt it would be wise to licencing the Python name to forestall any
lawsuits. An added benefit is that John Cleese is teaching Guido how to walk
funny.
(3) Pre-Release vacations are spent in the Catskills. Post-Release
vacations are spent in the Bahamas. Guido is currently working on a system
which will allow him to make more releases of Python; thus octupling the number
of vacations he takes in a year.
-- Matthew Lewis Carroll Smith, 4 Apr 1997
I mean, just take a look at Joe Strout's brilliant little "python for
beginners" page. Replace all print-statements with sys.stdout.write(
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to get an easy 2% today than dream about 100% forever.
-- Tim Peters, 22 Mar 1998
I've been playing spoilsport in an attempt to get tabnanny.py working, but now
that there's absolutely no reason to continue with this, the amount of my life
I'm willing to devote to it is unbounded <0.9 wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 30 Mar 1998
Python is a little weak in forcing encapsulation. It isn't made for bondage and
domination environments.
-- Paul Prescod, 30 Mar 1998
One of my first big programming assignments as a student of computer science
was a source formatter for Pascal. The assignment was designed to show us the
real-life difficulties of group programming projects. It succeeded perhaps too
well. For a long time, I was convinced that source code formatters were a total
waste of time, and decided to write beautiful code that no automatic formatter
could improve upon. In fact, I would intentionally write code that formatters
could only make worse.
-- Guido van Rossum, 31 Mar 1998
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"Like clothes.launder() vs money.launder(), or shape.draw() vs
blood.draw(), or matrix.norm() vs hi.norm() <wink>? I'm afraid English thrives
on puns, and the same word routinely means radically different things across
application areas. Therefore, to insist that a word have "one true meaning" in
a programming language is insisting that the language cater to one true
application domain."
-- Jim Fulton and Tim Peters, in a discussion of rich comparisons, 29
Apr 1998
Indeed, when I design *my* killer language, the identifiers "foo" and "bar"
will be reserved words, never used, and not even mentioned in the reference
manual. Any program using one will simply dump core without comment. Multitudes
will rejoice.
-- Tim Peters, 29 Apr 1998
Too little freedom makes life confusingly clumsy; too much, clumsily confusing.
Luckily, the tension between freedom and restraint eventually gets severed by
Guido's Razor.
-- Tim Peters, 29 Apr 1998
In other words, I'm willing to see dark corners added to the language, as long
as I don't have to go into them myself.
-- A.M. Kuchling, 29 Apr 1998
This argument is specious. What on earth would it mean to compare an object you
created with another object from someone else's code unless you knew exactly
what each object's semantics were? Do you really want to ask if my abstract
syntax tree is less then your HTTP connection object?
-- Jeremy Hylton, in a discussion of rich comparisons, 29 Apr 1998
Two things I learned for sure during a particularly intense acid trip in my own
lost youth: (1) everything is a trivial special case of something else; and,
(2) death is a bunch of blue spheres.
-- Tim Peters, 1 May 1998
Well, they will be: "<" will mean what everyone thinks it means when applied to
builtin types, and will mean whatever __lt__ makes it mean otherwise, except
when __lt__ isn't defined but __cmp__ is in which case it will mean whatever
__cmp__ makes it mean, except when neither __lt__ or __cmp__ are defined in
which case it's still unsettled. I think. Or isn't that what you meant by
"clearly defined"?
-- Tim Peters, 6 May 1998
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others rush toward perceived opportunity. That's up to them. But I think it's
enormously *clarifying* in either case to see just *how* raw this particular
gimmick can get.
-- Tim Peters, 16 Jun 1998
Every language has its partisans, usually among folks deeply immersed in their
particular theology, triumphant in having divined the inner meaning of some
esoteric operations, like a medieval Jesuit hot on the trail of the final
ontological proof, whose conciseness in solving a single problem makes them
almost swoon with ecstacy at the expected savings of many keystrokes, as if
those very keystrokes represented a lot of heavy lifting and hauling on their
part.
-- John Holmgren, 18 Jun 1998
> In general, the situation sucks.
mind-if-i-use-that-as-my-epitaph<wink>?-ly y'rs - tim
-- Timothy J. Grant and Tim Peters, 22 Jun 1998
> Just for the record, on AIX, the following C program:
Oh no you don't! I followed AIX threads for the first year it came out, but
eventually decided there was no future in investing time in baffling
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<0.9 wink>.
-- Vladimir Marangozov and Tim Peters, 23 Jun 1998
Python - why settle for snake oil when you can have the *whole* snake?
-- Mark Jackson, 26 Jun 1998
The problem I have with "SETL sets" in Python is the same I have with every
other language's "killer core" in Python: SETL is much more than just "a set
type", Eiffel is much more than just fancy pre- and post- conditions, Perl's
approach to regexps is much more than just its isolated regexp syntax, Scheme
is much more than just first-class functions & lexical closures, and so on.
Good languages aren't random collections of interchangeable features: they have
a philosophy and internal coherence that's never profitably confused with their
surface features.
-- Tim Peters, 10 Jul 1998
"Since I'm so close to the pickle module, I just look at the pickles
directly, as I'm pretty good at reading pickles."
"As you all can imagine, this trick goes over really well at parties."
-- Jim Fulton and Paul Everitt on the Bobo list, 17 Jul 1998
My theory is that the churning of old threads and reminiscences (Continuations,
Icon influences, old-T-shirts, the pre news-group mailing list archive,
whitespace, closures, .... ) has brought some old messages to the surface, via
some mechanism similar to the way plankton and other nutrients are cycled in
the ocean.
-- Steven D. Majewski, 23 Jul 1998
In general, Our Guido flees from schemes that merely change *which* foot gets
blown off <0.45 caliber wink>. Schemes that remove the firing pin entirely have
a much better, um, shot <wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 25 Jul 1998
I don't know what "invert the control structure" means -- but if it's anything
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be implemented directly as light sugar for ordinary Python loops, leaving
lambdas out of it entirely. You end up with a subtly different beast, but so
far it appears to be a beast that's compatible with cuddly pythons.
-- Tim Peters, 6 Aug 1998
I wonder what Guido thinks he might do in Python2 (assuming, of course, that he
doesn't hire a bus to run over him before then <wink>).
-- Tim Peters, 26 Aug 1998
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
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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
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"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.
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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.
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Excellent plan! Devious minds are attracted to Python, like mimes to
unappreciative crowds.
-- Tim Peters, 13 Nov 1998
Ha! If we had only started numbering dimensions with one, we'd already be
living in a 4-D world, and Mental Organons would be *all over the place*!
-- Tim Peters, 13 Nov 1998
Well, during those periods when I was me, there was most assuredly only one of
me. But during some of the more intense discussions, I was not me, and while
all the rest of the attendees were also not me, it is difficult to say whether
they were the same not me that I was or wasn't at the time.
-- 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.)
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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!
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"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
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
solving one level of compatibility just gives rise to the next level of
incompatibility. For example, connecting computers together through standard
protocols gives rise to the problem of byte endianness issues. Solving byte
endianness gives rise to the problem of character sets. Solving character sets
gives rise to the problem of end-of-line and end-of-file conventions. Solving
that gets us to the problem of interpreting the low-level syntax (thus XML).
Then we need to interpet that syntax in terms of objects and properties (thus
RDF, WDDX, etc.). And so forth.
We could judge a standard's success by its ability to reveal another level
of standardization that is necessary.
-- Paul Prescod, 24 Jan 1999
I just want to go on the record as being completely opposed to computer
languages. Let them have their own language and soon they'll be off in the
corner plotting with each other!
-- Steven D. Majewski, 25 Jan 1999
Constraints often boost creativity.
-- Jim Hugunin, 11 Feb 1999
Programming is no different - it's only by going outside what you know, and
looking from another direction (working, if you like, your brain, so that it
can be more powerful :-) that you can improve further.
-- Andrew Cooke, 12 Feb 1999
any-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-is-too-mysterious- to- trust-ly
y'rs
-- Tim Peters, 16 Feb 1999
"I don't think we've thought of this, and it's actually a good idea."
"I'd better go patent it!"
-- Uche Ogbuji and Paul Prescod, 16 Feb 1999
Contrary to advertising, no parsing system is "easy to learn", in or out of the
Python world -- parsing is a hard problem. Most are easy enough to use after
practice, though. Ironically, the trickiest system of all to master (regexps)
is also the feeblest and the most widely used.
-- Tim Peters, 17 Feb 1999
So Python's only cross-platform choices were to mimic the C/POSIX API or invent
its own new x-platform API; only one of those is realistic (as Java proves
every day <wink>).
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... we need more people like him, who are willing to explore without being
driven to argue with people about it.
-- William Tanksley on Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, 2 Jul 1999
Sorry for the term, I picked it up from Jim Fulton back when it was an
about-to-be-added feature for Principia/Aqueduct. As with so many Fultonisms,
it's vivid and tends to stick in one's (non-pluggable) brain.
-- Paul Everitt on the term "pluggable brains", 5 Jul 1999
I picture a lump of inanimate flesh (a result from a relational database query)
being infused with the spark of life (object behavior, aka class).
-- Jim Fulton on the term "pluggable brains", 5 Jul 1999
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
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
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
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
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
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:
floating point sucks, rationals suck, refusing to allow int division sucks, the
constructive reals suck, symbolic manipulation sucks, ..., but all in different
ways for different reasons. Every one bristles with its own brands of both
shallow and deep "surprises". So it goes -- seeking to represent the infinite
by the finite is an inherently unreachable goal. This is also why people die
<wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 4 Mar 2000
The reason I'm right is that I said there won't be any *single* "survivor"
of the evolutionary struggle, and that the efforts to crown one's favorite as
such are just so much noise. The software ecosystem of the foreseeable future
will always have its own form of "diversity": there will be lions *and*
elephants *and* fish *and* seals *and* birds, because there will be many
diverse "habitats" where the particular adaptations of each will be
needed/advantageous.
The reasoned debates (as opposed to religious wars) may lead to lions with
opposable thumbs, or elephants that can see in the infrared, but there will
never be a 2000-pound fish with a mane and wings. Well, not outside the lab,
anyway.
-- Ran, 5 Mar 2000
"Complexity" seems to be a lot like "energy": you can *transfer* it from the
end user to one/some of the other players, but the total amount seems to remain
pretty much constant for a given task.
-- Ran, 5 Mar 2000
LaTeX2HTML is pain.
-- Fred Drake in a documentation checkin message, 14 Mar 2000
Here, have some cycles of reversed kielbasa. And ten (10 (0xa (101010b)))
Usenet Points, redeemable in comp.lang.python for increased local prestige.
Some prestige may depend upon your own actions. Local Prestige may or may not
have any effect on your actual life (or lack thereof).
-- William Tanksley, 21 Mar 2000
Mucking with builtins is fun the way huffing dry erase markers is fun. Things
are very pretty at first, but eventually the brain cell lossage will more than
outweigh that cheap thrill.
-- Barry Warsaw, 23 Mar 2000
>Have you ever looked at the output of a bib | tbl | eqn pipeline?
Are you kids still using that as a pick-up line?
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
-- 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
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
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
INTERVIEWER: Tell us how you came to be drawn into the world of pragmas.
COMPILER WRITER: Well, it started off with little things. Just a few
boolean flags, a way to turn asserts on and off, debug output, that sort of
thing. I thought, what harm can it do? It's not like I'm doing anything you
couldn't do with command line switches, right? Then it got a little bit
heavier, integer values for optimisation levels, even the odd string or two.
Before I knew it I was doing the real hard stuff, constant expressions,
conditionals, the whole shooting box. Then one day when I put in a hook for
making arbitrary calls into the interpreter, that was when I finally realised I
had a problem...
-- Greg Ewing, 31 Aug 2000
The modules people have built for Python are like the roads the Romans built
through Europe. On this solid ground, you can move fast as you work on aspects
of program design that aren't so analytical -- user interface, multi-threaded
event dispatching models, all kinds of things that can be done a lot of
different ways and are hard to get right the first time through.
-- Donn Cave, 3 Sep 2000
Python 2.0 beta 1 is now available from BeOpen PythonLabs. There is a long list
of new features since Python 1.6, released earlier today. We don't plan on any
new releases in the next 24 hours.
-- Jeremy Hylton, in the 2.0b1 announcement, 5 Sep 2000
Fortunately, you've left that madness behind, and entered the clean, happy, and
safe Python world of transvestite lumberjacks and singing Vikings.
-- Quinn Dunkan, 17 Sep 2000
Regular expressions are among my most valued tools, along with goto, eval,
multiple inheritance, preemptive multithreading, floating point, run-time type
identification, a big knife, a bottle of bleach, and 120VAC electricity. All of
these things suck sometimes.
-- Kragen Sitaker, 27 Sep 2000
IIRC, he didn't much care for regexps before, but actually writing a regexp
engine drives most people who do it to intense hatred.
Just more of the magic of Python! Transmuting a few peoples' intense agony
into the subject of others' idle amusement <wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 27 Sep 2000
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
"Interim steps" have a tendency to become permanent in our industry, where
"Compatibility" is the way the sins of the fathers are inflicted upon the third
and fourth generations ...
-- William Kahan, quoted by Huaiyu Zhu, 16 Oct 2000
The most successful projects I've seen and been on *did* rewrite all the code
routinely, but one subsystem at a time. This happens when you're tempted to add
a hack, realize it wouldn't be needed if an entire area were reworked, and mgmt
is bright enough to realize that hacks compound in fatal ways over time. The
"ain't broke, don't fix" philosophy is a good guide here, provided you've got a
very low threshold for insisting "it's broke".
-- Tim Peters, 25 Oct 2000
Humour is a tricky thing. Some people can't even get the spelling right.
-- Richard Brodie, 30 Oct 2000
The same way as you get the name of that cat you found on your porch: the
cat (object) itself cannot tell you its name, and it doesn't really care -- so
the only way to find out what it's called is to ask all your neighbours
(namespaces) if it's their cat (object)...
....and don't be surprised if you'll find that it's known by many names, or
no name at all!
-- Fredrik Lundh, 3 Nov 2000, in answer to the question "How can I
get the name of a variable from C++ when I have the PyObject*?"
These are mostly nice features, to be sure, but they're also just that:
features. C++ has features. Python doesn't have a stellar score on my
elegance-o-meter, but for me its major win is the lack of features, and lack of
ambiguities. It fits in my brain.
-- Quinn Dunkan, 18 Nov 2000
When explaining programming I sometimes compare programmers to photographers:
amateur photographers talk about cameras and lenses and gadgets. They know how
to make their camera do almost anything, and they are keen to argue the merits
of their favorite tools. Professional photographers talk about contrast and
lighting and composition. The camera is almost irrelevant. Ansel Adams used
cameras that were less sophisticated than a supermarket disposable, back when
photography was slow and tedious (like batch-oriented programming). Because the
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
The Martellibot Mark 1 has a completely European flavour to it, and adds a
cosmopolitan touch of linguistics to its output, sprinkling foreign language
references in. It is similar to the timbot in its overall erudition, but can be
distinguished from it by its tendency to indulge in flamewars (which, I
believe, it does mostly to convince us it is human).
-- Steve Holden, 13 Dec 2000
In keeping with the religious nature of the battle-- and religion offers
precise terms for degrees of damnation! --I suggest:
struggling -- a supported feature; the initial state of all features; may
transition to Anathematized
anathematized -- this feature is now cursed, but is supported; may
transition to Condemned or Struggling; intimacy with Anathematized features is
perilous
condemned -- a feature scheduled for crucifixion; may transition to
Crucified, Anathematized (this transition is called "a pardon"), or Struggling
(this transition is called "a miracle"); intimacy with Condemned features is
suicidal
crucified -- a feature that is no longer supported; may transition to
Resurrected
resurrected -- a once-Crucified feature that is again supported; may
transition to Condemned, Anathematized or Struggling; although since
Resurrection is a state of grace, there may be no point in human time at which
a feature is identifiably Resurrected (i.e., it may *appear*, to the
unenlightened, that a feature moved directly from Crucified to Anathematized or
Struggling or Condemned -- although saying so out loud is heresy).
-- Tim Peters, 18 Dec 2000
my-python-code-runs-5x-faster-this-month-thanks-to-dumping-$2K- on-a-
new-machine-ly y'rs
-- Tim Peters, 26 Dec 2000
Really, I should pronounce on that PEP (I don't like it very much but haven't
found the right argument to reject it :-) ) so this patch can either go in or
be rejected.
-- GvR, 04 Jan 2001, in a comment on patch #101264
The rest is history: the glory, the fame, the riches, the groupies, the
adulation of my peers. We won't mention the financial scandal and subsequent
bankruptcy lest it discourage you for no good reason <wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 14 Jan 2001
If you're using anything besides US-ASCII, I *stringly* suggest Python 2.0.
-- Uche Ogbuji (A fortuitous typo?), 29 Jan 2001
"There goes Tim, browsing the Playboy site just for the JavaScript.
Honest."
"Well, it's not like they had many floating-point numbers to ogle! I like
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
"It's in ClassModules.py you dumb f**k - can't you tell by the name?"
"Furthermore, RTFM is much more effective if you do it gently and make them
feel nicely embarrassed, rather than having them just say 'well, fuck you too'
when reading the first insult, and not learn a thing."
"Thanks. I'll try to keep that in mind the next time I flame myself."
-- Phlip, following up to a query he'd posted earlier, and Thomas
Wouters, 18 Feb 2001
"Also, does the simple algorithm you used in Cyclops have a name?"
"Not officially, but it answers to "hey, dumb-ass!"
-- Neil Schemenauer, interested in finding strongly connected
components in graphs, and Tim Peters, 23 Feb 2001
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
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
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).
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
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"
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
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
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
The Lisp community is like a ghost town, with the occasional banshee howl
echoing darkly around the chamber in lament of what might have been.
-- Courageous, 19 Jan 2002
I'll lend you _Calendrical Calculations_. Even *skimming* the chapters on some
of the world's other calendrical delights makes our date gimmicks blind via the
intensity of their clarity.
-- Tim Peters, 05 Mar 2002
The joy of coding Python should be in seeing short, concise, readable classes
that express a lot of action in a small amount of clear code -- not in reams of
trivial code that bores the reader to death.
-- GvR, 20 Mar 2002
A bot may injure a human being, or, preferably, through inaction, allow a human
being to come to harm, although laughing about either in the hearing of humans
is MACNAM-017B3^H.
-- Tim Peters, 26 Mar 2002
"It works in Scheme" doesn't give me the warm fuzzy feeling that it's been
tried in real life.
-- GvR, 02 Oct 2002
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
A fruitful approach to problem solving is known as "divide and conquer", or
making problems easier by splitting their different aspects apart. Making
problems harder by joining several aspects together must be an example of an
approach known as "unite and suffer!"
-- Alex Martelli, _Python Cookbook_
compromise-is-the-art-of-spreading-misery-ly y'rs
-- Tim Peters, 11 Dec 2002
As for Grail, it was certainly a "hot product" in the Python community in 1995
because of the restricted execution environment which I evaluated for a project
involving mobile software agents. How priorities and trends have changed since
then! Who would have thought that Microsoft Outlook would be the premier
platform for mobile code?
-- Paul Boddie, 16 Jan 2004
I mean, if I think about my open-source contributions, nobody wants to see
talks with these titles:
* The Zope API Reference: Ouch
* A Random Handful Of Bugs I've Fixed In Other Peoples' Code
* An Old Crufty Project I Inherited That Has Zero Relevance To You
* The Joy of Preemptive Abandonware: Release Late, If Ever (or, Software
Design as a Nihilistic Abstract Art Form) (or, Sourceforge as a Medium for
Cryptic Time Capsules)
-- Paul Winkler, 14 Mar 2005
Syntax should not look like grit on my monitor.
-- Anthony Baxter, 02 Jun 2005
Can this not be resolved by carefully adjusting the order of finalization? If
code can be bootstrapped it can be strootbapped.
-- Kristján Jónsson, 30 Jun 2006
Python resembles Lisp like an octopus eye resembles a mammalian eye: they have
lots in common because they're both pretty good solutions to similar problems.
Deciding whether it's Python or Lisp that has the retina fitted back-to-front
is left as an exercise for the reader.
-- Gareth McCaughan, 11 Jul 2006
As Neal said, we are not perfect; bugs happen. If we all gave up on a piece of
software after two bugs we would not be able to turn our computers.
-- Brett Cannon, 13 Jul 2006
... I've come to believe that some people have the personality traits that let
them tolerate redoing the same work over and over again for no reason other
than management "furniture rearranging", whereas others start to resent having
their (working) life repeatedly flashed before their eyes, but in slightly
different colours, over a longer period of time.
-- Paul Boddie, 29 Aug 2006
I am the very model of a modern major database,
For gigabytes of information gathered out in userspace.
For banking applications to a website crackers will deface,
You access me from console or spiffy user interface.
My multi-threaded architecture offers you concurrency,
And loads of RAM for caching things reduces query latency.
t/data/simpsons_quotes.csv view on Meta::CPAN
"My cat's breath smells like cat food.","Ralph Wiggum","The Simpsons","Humor",9.8
"I dropped my popstickle in your toy chest","Ralph Wiggum","The Simpsons","Humor",4
"Milhouse: Why does Bart have a comic book? Comic Book Guy: Your questions have become more redundant and annoying then the last three ""Highlander"" movies.","Comic Book Guy","The Simpsons","Humor",7
"But, Aquaman, you cannot marry a woman without gills. You're from two different worlds... Oh, I've wasted my life.","Comic Book Guy","The Simpsons","Humor",4
"Bart: It's valuable, huh?! Comic Book Guy: Ooh, your powers of deduction are exceptional. I can't allow you to waste them here when there are so many crimes going unsolved at this very moment. Go, go, for the good of the city.","Comic Book Guy","The...
"Last night's 'Itchy and Scratchy Show' was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured, I was on the internet within minutes, registering my disgust throughout the world.","Comic Book Guy","The Simpsons","Humor",5
"Stop right there! I have the only working fazer ever built. It was fired only once to keep William Shatner from making another album.","Comic Book Guy","The Simpsons","Humor",7
"The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity... .","Comic Book Guy","The Simpsons","Humor",4.3
"Oh, loneliness and cheeseburgers are a dangerous mix.","Comic Book Guy","The Simpsons","Humor",3
"That is a rare photo of Sean Connery signed by Roger Moore.","Comic Book Guy","The Simpsons","Humor",4.7
"Hello. I am not interested in buying your house, but I would like to use your rest room, flip through your magazines, rearrange your carefully shelved items and handle your food products in an unsanitary manner. Ha! Now you know how it feels!)","Apu...
"Hey, hey, this is not a lending library. If you're not going to buy that thing put it down or I'll blow your heads off","Apu Nahasapemapetilon","The Simpsons","Humor",6
"Shiva H. Vishnu!","Apu Nahasapemapetilon","The Simpsons","Humor",6
"Big deal! When I was a pup, we got spanked by presidents 'til the cows came home! Grover Cleveland spanked me on two non-consecutive occasions!","Grandpa Simpson","The Simpsons","Humor",6
"My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star.","Grandpa Simpson","The Simpsons","Humor",9
"Dear Mr. President, There are too many states nowadays. Please eliminate three. P.S. I am not a crackpot.","Grandpa Simpson","The Simpsons","Humor",9.5
t/data/simpsons_quotes.tsv.csv view on Meta::CPAN
My cat's breath smells like cat food. Ralph Wiggum
I dropped my popstickle in your toy chest Ralph Wiggum
Milhouse: Why does Bart have a comic book? Comic Book Guy: Your questions have become more redundant and annoying then the last three 'Highlander' movies. Comic Book Guy
But, Aquaman, you cannot marry a woman without gills. You're from two different worlds... Oh, I've wasted my life. Comic Book Guy
Bart: It's valuable, huh?! Comic Book Guy: Ooh, your powers of deduction are exceptional. I can't allow you to waste them here when there are so many crimes going unsolved at this very moment. Go, go, for the good of the city. Comic Book Guy
Last night's 'Itchy and Scratchy Show' was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured, I was on the internet within minutes, registering my disgust throughout the world. Comic Book Guy
Stop right there! I have the only working fazer ever built. It was fired only once to keep William Shatner from making another album. Comic Book Guy
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity... . Comic Book Guy
Oh, loneliness and cheeseburgers are a dangerous mix. Comic Book Guy
That is a rare photo of Sean Connery signed by Roger Moore. Comic Book Guy
Hello. I am not interested in buying your house, but I would like to use your rest room, flip through your magazines, rearrange your carefully shelved items and handle your food products in an unsanitary manner. Ha! Now you know how it feels!) Apu Na...
Hey, hey, this is not a lending library. If you're not going to buy that thing put it down or I'll blow your heads off Apu Nahasapemapetilon
Shiva H. Vishnu! Apu Nahasapemapetilon
Big deal! When I was a pup, we got spanked by presidents 'til the cows came home! Grover Cleveland spanked me on two non-consecutive occasions! Grandpa Simpson
My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star. Grandpa Simpson
Dear Mr. President, There are too many states nowadays. Please eliminate three. P.S. I am not a crackpot. Grandpa Simpson
t/data/www.amk.ca/quotations/python-quotes/index.html view on Meta::CPAN
"../robertson-davies/">Robertson Davies</a> | <a class=
"sidebar-link" href="../sherlock-holmes/">Sherlock Holmes</a>
| <a class="sidebar-link" href=
"../tom-baker/">Tom Baker</a></p>
</div>
<div class="content">
<hr />
<p class='quotation' id='q1'>We will perhaps eventually be writing
only small modules which are identified by name as they are used to
build larger ones, so that devices like indentation, rather than
delimiters, might become feasible for expressing local structure in
the source language.</p>
<p class='source'>Donald E. Knuth, "Structured Programming with
goto Statements", Computing Surveys, Vol 6 No 4, Dec. 1974</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q315'>Python's syntax succeeds in
combining the mistakes of Lisp and Fortran. I do not construe that
as progress.</p>
<p class='source'>Larry Wall, May 12 2004</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q2'>Some rejected alternate names for
"Monty Python's Flying Circus": 1 2 3 / It's Them! / Arthur Megapode's Flying
Circus / The Horrible Earnest Megapode / The Panic Show / The
Plastic Mac Show / Ow! It's Colin Plint! / Vaseline Review /
Vaseline Parade / The Keen Show / Brian's Flying Circus / The Year
of the Stoat / Cynthia Fellatio's Flying Circus / Owl Stretching
Time / The Whizzo Easishow! (Guaranteed to last 1/2 hour! Money
back if not!)</p>
<p class='source'>From Kim "Howard" Johnson's <cite>Life Before and
After Monty Python</cite>. It's interesting to contemplate what
Python would have been called if one of these names had been
chosen.</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q3'>Anybody else on the list got an
opinion? Should I change the language or not?</p>
<p class='source'>Guido van Rossum, 28 Dec 1991</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q4'>
in-any-case-the-best-christmas-present-i-got-today!-ly y'rs -
tim</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 29 Dec 1991 [First occurrence of Tim
Peters's long-phrase-ly idiom.]</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q5'>
but-i'm-not-even-motivated-enough-to-finish-this-sig-</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 20 Dec 2000</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q6'>Ha -- you have done me the favor of
underestimating my ignorance <smile>.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 30 Dec 1991</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q7'>I prefer (all things being equal)
regularity/orthogonality and logical syntax/semantics in a language
because there is less to have to remember. (Of course I
<em>know</em> all things are NEVER really equal!)</p>
<p class='source'>Guido van Rossum, 6 Dec 1991</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q8'>The details of that silly code are
irrelevant.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 4 Mar 1992</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q9'>Frankly, I'd rather not try to compete
t/data/www.amk.ca/quotations/python-quotes/index.html view on Meta::CPAN
joyous adventure <wink>.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 16 Sep 1993</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q16'>I've seen Python criticized as "ugly"
precisely because it <em>doesn't</em> have a trick-based view of
the world. In many ways, it's a dull language, borrowing solid old
concepts from many other languages & styles: boring syntax,
unsurprising semantics, few automatic coercions, etc etc. But
that's one of the things I like about it.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 16 Sep 1993</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q17'>One of the things that makes it
interesting, is exactly how much Guido has managed to exploit that
<em>one</em> implementation trick of 'namespaces'.</p>
<p class='source'>Steven D. Majewski, 17 Sep 1993</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q18'>Anyone familiar with Modula-3 should
appreciate the difference between a layered approach, with generic
Rd/Wr types, and the Python 'C with foam padding' approach.</p>
<p class='source'>John Redford, 24 Nov 1993</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q19'>People simply will not agree on what
should and shouldn't be "an error", and once exception-handling
mechanisms are introduced to give people a choice, they will far
less agree on what to do with them.</p>
t/data/www.amk.ca/quotations/python-quotes/index.html view on Meta::CPAN
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
t/data/www.amk.ca/quotations/python-quotes/index.html view on Meta::CPAN
<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'>>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>
t/data/www.amk.ca/quotations/python-quotes/index.html view on Meta::CPAN
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>).</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 25 Mar 1997</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q34'>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
...</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,
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"sidebar-link" href="../python-quotes/">Python</a> | <a class=
"sidebar-link" href=
"../robertson-davies/">Robertson Davies</a> | <a class=
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| <a class="sidebar-link" href=
"../tom-baker/">Tom Baker</a></p>
</div>
<div class="content">
<hr />
<p class='quotation' id='q312'>The joy of coding Python should be
in seeing short, concise, readable classes that express a lot of
action in a small amount of clear code -- not in reams of trivial
code that bores the reader to death.</p>
<p class='source'>GvR, 20 Mar 2002</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q313'>A bot may injure a human being, or,
preferably, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm,
although laughing about either in the hearing of humans is
MACNAM-017B3^H.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 26 Mar 2002</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q314'>"It works in Scheme" doesn't give me
the warm fuzzy feeling that it's been tried in real life.</p>
<p class='source'>GvR, 02 Oct 2002</p>
<p class='quotation'>Most recipes are short enough for the
t/data/www.amk.ca/quotations/python-quotes/page-10.html view on Meta::CPAN
known as "divide and conquer", or making problems easier by
splitting their different aspects apart. Making problems harder by
joining several aspects together must be an example of an approach
known as "unite and suffer!"</p>
<p class='source'>Alex Martelli<cite>Python Cookbook</cite></p>
<p class='quotation' id='q313'>
compromise-is-the-art-of-spreading-misery-ly y'rs</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 11 Dec 2002</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q314'>As for Grail, it was certainly a
"hot product" in the Python community in 1995 because of the
restricted execution environment which I evaluated for a project
involving mobile software agents. How priorities and trends have
changed since then! Who would have thought that Microsoft Outlook
would be the premier platform for mobile code?</p>
<p class='source'>Paul Boddie, 16 Jan 2004</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q314'>I mean, if I think about my
open-source contributions, nobody wants to see talks with these
titles:
<p class='quotation'>* The Zope API Reference: Ouch
* A Random Handful Of Bugs I've Fixed In Other Peoples' Code
* An Old Crufty Project I Inherited That Has Zero Relevance To You
* The Joy of Preemptive Abandonware: Release Late, If Ever
(or, Software Design as a Nihilistic Abstract Art
Form) (or, Sourceforge as a Medium for Cryptic Time Capsules)</p>
<p class='source'>Paul Winkler, 14 Mar 2005</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q316'>Syntax should not look like grit on
my monitor.</p>
<p class='source'>Anthony Baxter, 02 Jun 2005</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q315'>Can this not be resolved by
carefully adjusting the order of finalization? If code can be
bootstrapped it can be strootbapped.</p>
<p class='source'>Kristján Jónsson, 30 Jun 2006</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q317'>Python resembles Lisp like an
octopus eye resembles a mammalian eye: they have lots in common
because they're both pretty good solutions to similar problems.
Deciding whether it's Python or Lisp that has the retina fitted
back-to-front is left as an exercise for the reader.</p>
<p class='source'>Gareth McCaughan, 11 Jul 2006</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q318'>As Neal said, we are not perfect;
bugs happen. If we all gave up on a piece of software after two
bugs we would not be able to turn our computers.</p>
<p class='source'>Brett Cannon, 13 Jul 2006</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q319'>... I've come to believe that some
people have the personality traits that let them tolerate redoing
the same work over and over again for no reason other than
management "furniture rearranging", whereas others start to resent
having their (working) life repeatedly flashed before their eyes,
but in slightly different colours, over a longer period of
time.</p>
<p class='source'>Paul Boddie, 29 Aug 2006</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q320'>I am the very model of a modern
major database,
For gigabytes of information gathered out in userspace.
For banking applications to a website crackers will deface,
You access me from console or spiffy user interface.
My multi-threaded architecture offers you
t/data/www.amk.ca/quotations/python-quotes/page-2.html view on Meta::CPAN
<p class='source'>Told by Nick Leaton, 4 Dec 1996</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q40'>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.</p>
<p class='source'>Larry Wall, 27 Feb 1997 on perl5-porters</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q41'>
PSA 1996 Budget
---------------
Income:
$1,093,276.54 'Guido for President'
Campaign Contributions(1)
$ 3.12 Milk Money Extortion Program
$ 2,934.07 PSA Memberships
-------------
$1,096,213.73 Total Income
Expenses:
$ 652,362.55 Monty Python Licencing Fees (2)
$ 10,876.45 Pre-Release 2 Week Vacations (3)
$ 369,841.59 Post-Release 2 Week Vacations (3)
$ 15.01 Alien Abduction Insurance
$ 62,541.72 Python Web Site Maintenance
$ 554.65 Great Comfort Cream
-------------
$1,096,191.97 Total Expenses
$ (21.76) Total Profit (Loss)
Notes:
(1) Many of you many not be aware of the
fabulously successful 'Guido for President' Campaign. While Guido
has no interest in being the president, the PSA thought it would be
a cool way to collect money. The centerpiece of the campaign
featured an attractive offer to spend the night in Guido's spare
bedroom in exchange for a $50,000.00 contribution. (Mark Lutz
stayed TWICE!)
(2) Since the proliferation of Monty Python
related names (Python, Monty, Grail, Eric-the-Half-a-Compiler, et
al.) has increased over the past year, the PSA felt it would be
wise to licencing the Python name to forestall any lawsuits. An
added benefit is that John Cleese is teaching Guido how to walk
funny.
(3) Pre-Release vacations are spent in the
Catskills. Post-Release vacations are spent in the Bahamas. Guido
is currently working on a system which will allow him to make more
releases of Python; thus octupling the number of vacations he takes
in a year.</p>
<p class='source'>Matthew Lewis Carroll Smith, 4 Apr 1997</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q42'>I mean, just take a look at Joe
Strout's brilliant little "python for beginners" page. Replace all
t/data/www.amk.ca/quotations/python-quotes/page-2.html view on Meta::CPAN
easy 2% today than dream about 100% forever.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 22 Mar 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q53'>I've been playing spoilsport in an
attempt to get tabnanny.py working, but now that there's absolutely
no reason to continue with this, the amount of my life I'm willing
to devote to it is unbounded <0.9 wink>.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 30 Mar 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q54'>Python is a little weak in forcing
encapsulation. It isn't made for bondage and domination
environments.</p>
<p class='source'>Paul Prescod, 30 Mar 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q55'>One of my first big programming
assignments as a student of computer science was a source formatter
for Pascal. The assignment was designed to show us the real-life
difficulties of group programming projects. It succeeded perhaps
too well. For a long time, I was convinced that source code
formatters were a total waste of time, and decided to write
beautiful code that no automatic formatter could improve upon. In
fact, I would intentionally write code that formatters could only
make worse.</p>
<p class='source'>Guido van Rossum, 31 Mar 1998</p>
t/data/www.amk.ca/quotations/python-quotes/page-2.html view on Meta::CPAN
"Like clothes.launder() vs money.launder(), or
shape.draw() vs blood.draw(), or matrix.norm() vs hi.norm()
<wink>? I'm afraid English thrives on puns, and the same word
routinely means radically different things across application
areas. Therefore, to insist that a word have "one true meaning" in
a programming language is insisting that the language cater to one
true application domain."</p>
<p class='source'>Jim Fulton and Tim Peters, in a discussion of
rich comparisons, 29 Apr 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q62'>Indeed, when I design <em>my</em>
killer language, the identifiers "foo" and "bar" will be reserved
words, never used, and not even mentioned in the reference manual.
Any program using one will simply dump core without comment.
Multitudes will rejoice.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 29 Apr 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q63'>Too little freedom makes life
confusingly clumsy; too much, clumsily confusing. Luckily, the
tension between freedom and restraint eventually gets severed by
Guido's Razor.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 29 Apr 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q64'>In other words, I'm willing to see
dark corners added to the language, as long as I don't have to go
into them myself.</p>
<p class='source'>A.M. Kuchling, 29 Apr 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q65'>This argument is specious. What on
earth would it mean to compare an object you created with another
object from someone else's code unless you knew exactly what each
object's semantics were? Do you really want to ask if my abstract
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"../robertson-davies/">Robertson Davies</a> | <a class=
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| <a class="sidebar-link" href=
"../tom-baker/">Tom Baker</a></p>
</div>
<div class="content">
<hr />
<p class='quotation' id='q66'>Two things I learned for sure during
a particularly intense acid trip in my own lost youth: (1)
everything is a trivial special case of something else; and, (2)
death is a bunch of blue spheres.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 1 May 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q67'>Well, they will be: "<" will mean
what everyone thinks it means when applied to builtin types, and
will mean whatever __lt__ makes it mean otherwise, except when
__lt__ isn't defined but __cmp__ is in which case it will mean
whatever __cmp__ makes it mean, except when neither __lt__ or
__cmp__ are defined in which case it's still unsettled. I think. Or
isn't that what you meant by "clearly defined"?</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 6 May 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q68'>You write a great program, regardless
t/data/www.amk.ca/quotations/python-quotes/page-3.html view on Meta::CPAN
perceived opportunity. That's up to them. But I think it's
enormously <em>clarifying</em> in either case to see just
<em>how</em> raw this particular gimmick can get.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 16 Jun 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q75'>Every language has its partisans,
usually among folks deeply immersed in their particular theology,
triumphant in having divined the inner meaning of some esoteric
operations, like a medieval Jesuit hot on the trail of the final
ontological proof, whose conciseness in solving a single problem
makes them almost swoon with ecstacy at the expected savings of
many keystrokes, as if those very keystrokes represented a lot of
heavy lifting and hauling on their part.</p>
<p class='source'>John Holmgren, 18 Jun 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q76'>> In general, the situation
sucks.
mind-if-i-use-that-as-my-epitaph<wink>?-ly y'rs - tim</p>
<p class='source'>Timothy J. Grant and Tim Peters, 22 Jun 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q77'>> Just for the record, on AIX, the
following C program:
Oh no you don't! I followed AIX threads for
the first year it came out, but eventually decided there was no
t/data/www.amk.ca/quotations/python-quotes/page-3.html view on Meta::CPAN
1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q78'>Python - why settle for snake oil
when you can have the <em>whole</em> snake?</p>
<p class='source'>Mark Jackson, 26 Jun 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q79'>The problem I have with "SETL sets"
in Python is the same I have with every other language's "killer
core" in Python: SETL is much more than just "a set type", Eiffel
is much more than just fancy pre- and post- conditions, Perl's
approach to regexps is much more than just its isolated regexp
syntax, Scheme is much more than just first-class functions &
lexical closures, and so on. Good languages aren't random
collections of interchangeable features: they have a philosophy and
internal coherence that's never profitably confused with their
surface features.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 10 Jul 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q80'>"Since I'm so close to the pickle
module, I just look at the pickles directly, as I'm pretty good at
reading pickles."
"As you all can imagine, this trick goes over
really well at parties."</p>
<p class='source'>Jim Fulton and Paul Everitt on the Bobo list, 17
Jul 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q81'>My theory is that the churning of old
threads and reminiscences (Continuations, Icon influences,
old-T-shirts, the pre news-group mailing list archive, whitespace,
closures, .... ) has brought some old messages to the surface, via
some mechanism similar to the way plankton and other nutrients are
cycled in the ocean.</p>
<p class='source'>Steven D. Majewski, 23 Jul 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q82'>In general, Our Guido flees from
schemes that merely change <em>which</em> foot gets blown off
<0.45 caliber wink>. Schemes that remove the firing pin
entirely have a much better, um, shot <wink>.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 25 Jul 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q83'>I don't know what "invert the control
structure" means -- but if it's anything like turning a hamster
t/data/www.amk.ca/quotations/python-quotes/page-3.html view on Meta::CPAN
directly as light sugar for ordinary Python loops, leaving lambdas
out of it entirely. You end up with a subtly different beast, but
so far it appears to be a beast that's compatible with cuddly
pythons.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 6 Aug 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q86'>I wonder what Guido thinks he might
do in Python2 (assuming, of course, that he doesn't hire a bus to
run over him before then <wink>).</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 26 Aug 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q87'>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...</p>
<p class='source'>John Eikenberry on the Bobo list, 27 Aug 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q88'>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
t/data/www.amk.ca/quotations/python-quotes/page-3.html view on Meta::CPAN
changes to the Python interpreter.</p>
<p class='source'>Donn Cave uses sarcasm with devastating effect,
28 Aug 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q89'>
then-again-if-history-were-important-god-wouldn't-have-hid-
it-in-the- past-ly y'rs</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 28 Aug 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q90'>
> >( float ( / 1 3 ))
> 0.33333333333333331
Now <em>that</em> 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.
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 2 Sep 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q91'>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!)</p>
<p class='source'>Fred Drake on the Documentation SIG, 9 Sep
1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q92'>There are also some surprises [in the
late Miocene Australia] some small mammals totally unknown and not
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