ACME-QuoteDB
view release on metacpan or search on metacpan
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
my seventh proof for the existence of God ...
-- Tim Peters, 25 Mar 1997
You're going to be in a minority - you're coming to Python programming from a
language which offers you a lot more in the way of comfortable operations than
Python, instead of coming from medieval torture chambers like C or Fortran,
which offer so much less.
-- Andrew Mullhaupt, 26 Jun 1997
...although Python uses an obsolete approach to memory management, it is a
*good* implementation of that approach, as opposed to S, which uses a
combination of bad implementation and demented design decisions to arrive at
what may very well be the worst memory behavior of any actually useful program.
-- Andrew Mullhaupt, 26 Jun 1997
I suggested holding a "Python Object Oriented Programming Seminar", but the
acronym was unpopular.
-- Joseph Strout, 28 Feb 1997
Strangely enough I saw just such a beast at the grocery store last night.
Starbucks sells Javachip. (It's ice cream, but that shouldn't be an obstacle
for the Java marketing people.)
-- Jeremy Hylton, 29 Apr 1997
A little girl goes into a pet show and asks for a wabbit. The shop keeper
looks down at her, smiles and says:
"Would you like a lovely fluffy little white rabbit, or a cutesy wootesly
little brown rabbit?"
"Actually", says the little girl, "I don't think my python would notice."
-- Told by Nick Leaton, 4 Dec 1996
When I originally designed Perl 5's OO, I thought about a lot of this stuff,
and chose the explicit object model of Python as being the least confusing. So
far I haven't seen a good reason to change my mind on that.
-- Larry Wall, 27 Feb 1997 on perl5-porters
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(
string.join(map(str, args)) + "\n") and you surely won't get any new beginners.
And That Would Be A Very Bad Thing.
-- Fredrik Lundh, 27 Aug 1996
Ya, ya, ya, except ... if I were built out of KSR chips, I'd be running at 25
or 50 MHz, and would be wrong about ALMOST EVERYTHING almost ALL THE TIME just
due to being a computer! Think about it -- when's the last time you spent 20
hours straight debugging your son/wife/friend/neighbor/dog/ferret/snake? And
they *still* fell over anyway? Except in a direction you've never seen before
each time you try it? The easiest way to tell you're dealing with a computer is
when the other side keeps making the same moronic misteakes over and misteakes
over and misteakes over and misteakes over and misteakes over and misteakes
CTRL-C again.
-- Tim Peters, 30 Apr 1997
BTW, a member of the ANSI C committee once told me that the only thing rand is
used for in C code is to decide whether to pick up the axe or throw the dwarf,
and if that's true I guess "the typical libc rand" is adequate for all but the
most fanatic of gamers <wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 21 June 1997.
Things in Python are very clear, but are harder to find than the secrets of
wizards. Things in Perl are easy to find, but look like arcane spells to invoke
magic.
-- Mike Meyer, 6 Nov 1997
Indeed, as Palin has come to understand, being part of Python means never
really knowing what may lurk around the corner.
"We've never really followed any rules at all with Python," he said. "We're
a spontaneous lot. It's more fun that way."
-- Michael Palin, quoted from a Reuters/Variety news item titled
"Rare Python Reunion", Jan 15 1998.
Python is an excellent language for learning object orientation. (It also
happens to be my favorite OO scripting language.)
-- Sriram Srinivasan, _Advanced Perl Programming_
The point is that newbies almost always read more into the semantics of release
than are specified, so it's worthwile to be explicit about how little is being
said <wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 12 Feb 1998
Ah! "Never mind" to a bunch of what I said before (this editor can't move
backwards <wink>).
-- Tim Peters, 12 Feb 1998
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
whole lot.
-- Tim Peters, 5 Jun 1998
I've had a DBA tell me that what I wanted to do "could not" be done because his
silly $5000 tool couldn't model it. Proving him wrong simply increased his
conviction that what I was doing was immoral and perverse. Which, come to think
of it, it probably was. Hee hee.
-- Gordon McMillan, 8 Jun 1998
The majority of programmers aren't really looking for flexibility. Most
languages that enjoy huge success seem to do so not because they're flexible,
but because they do one particular thing *extremely* well. Like Fortran for
fast number-crunching in its day, or Perl for regexps, or C++ for compatibility
with C, or C for ... well, C's the exception that proves the rule.
-- Tim Peters, 11 Jun 1998
It has also been referred to as the "Don Beaudry *hack*," but that's a
misnomer. There's nothing hackish about it -- in fact, it is rather elegant and
deep, even though there's something dark to it.
-- Guido van Rossum, _Metaclass Programming in Python 1.5_
Just point your web browser at http://www.python.org/search/ and look for
"program", "doesn't", "work", or "my". Whenever you find someone else whose
program didn't work, don't do what they did. Repeat as needed.
-- Tim Peters, on python-help, 16 Jun 1998
Now some people see unchecked raw power and flee from perceived danger, while
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
discussions that usually ended with "oh, never mind -- turns out it's a bug"
<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
like turning a hamster inside-out, I would *expect* it to be messy <wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 25 Jul 1998
This makes it possible to pass complex object hierarchies to a C coder who
thinks computer science has made no worthwhile advancements since the invention
of the pointer.
-- Gordon McMillan, 30 Jul 1998
The nice thing about list comprehensions is that their most useful forms could
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
(appropriately awarded names such as _Thingodonta_ and _Weirdodonta_) and a
giant python immortalized as _Montypythonoides_.
-- _The Book of Life_, found by Aaron Watters
Can the denizens of this group enlighten me about what the advantages of
Python are, versus Perl ?
"python" is more likely to pass unharmed through your spelling checker than
"perl".
-- An unknown poster and Fredrik Lundh, 11 Sep 1998
I have to say that the Dragon book is good when you consider the alternatives,
but compared with the Platonic ideal it leaves much to be desired. In
particular the algorithm descriptions are described at such a low level it's
difficult to understand how they work -- and at a higher conceptual level
involving graph theoretical transforms of automata (which I got thanks to Jean
Gallier by word of mouth and effort of chalk) is nearly invisible for the
trees.
-- Aaron Watters, 17 Sep 1998
... and at a higher conceptual level involving graph theoretical transforms of
automata (which I got thanks to Jean Gallier by word of mouth and effort of
chalk) ...
-- Aaron Watters, 17 Sep 1998
Every clarity vanished? :-)
-- Christian Tismer after answering a poster's question, 17 Sep 1998
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
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
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!
emancipate variable: declare absolute freedom for one variable. It can be
whatever it wants whenever it wants in whatever form it wants in whatever
language it wants on whatever computer it wants. In the ensuing chaos it will
get nothing done, but it will give programmers stories to tell for years to
come...
-- Mike Fletcher, 25 Dec 1998
"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
I really don't have any incisive insights about the economic mechanisms or
viability of free software and open source, but I do have a strong, clear sense
that such things make it possible for me to do my job, as a programmer and a
facilitator of/participant in online communities, better and more easily than I
otherwise could do.
-- Ken Manheimer, 24 Jan 1999
Every standard applies to a certain problem domain and a certain level. A
standard can work perfectly and save the world economy billions of dollars and
there will still be software and hardware compatibility problems. In fact,
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.
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
its own new x-platform API; only one of those is realistic (as Java proves
every day <wink>).
-- Tim Peters, 21 Feb 1999
Yes: the code in ntpath.split is too clever to have any hope of working
correctly <wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 19 Mar 1999
Thanks. The sooner I get discouraged and quit, the more time I'll save overall.
-- Frank Sergeant, 28 Mar 1999
But it's a general way to debug: tell someone what right things your program is
doing. Chances are that you will see the wrong thing(s) before the other person
has said anything... I just stick a picture of a face on my monitor and talk to
it to find bugs.
-- Richard van de Stadt, 9 Apr 1999
Might just be nostalgia, but I think I would give an arm or two to get that
(not necessarily my own, though).
-- Fredrik Lundh, 13 May 1999
1. Beautiful is better than ugly.
2. Explicit is better than implicit.
3. Simple is better than complex.
4. Complex is better than complicated.
5. Flat is better than nested.
6. Sparse is better than dense.
7. Readability counts.
8. Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
9. Although practicality beats purity.
10. Errors should never pass silently.
11. Unless explicitly silenced.
12. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
13. There should be one -- and preferably only one -- obvious way to do it.
14. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
15. Now is better than never.
16. Although never is often better than *right* now.
17. If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
18. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
19. Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
-- Tim Peters' 19 Pythonic Theses, 4 Jun 1999
"However, I've heard that after about 10K items in a dict, it starts having
problems."
"11,523 to be exact. After that, dicts drink to excess and show up for work
late the morning after. We don't like to talk about it, though."
-- Aahz Maruch and Tim Peters, 8 Jun 1999
Stackless Python 0.2, a plug-in replacement for the Python core that does not
use the C stack, has been announced by Christian Tismer as the best way to
prove that it was possible without a major rewrite to the core. Neel
Krishnaswami commented to Christian, "This is very neat, and you are completely
deranged".
-- From Linux Weekly News, 17 Jul 1999
... 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
Since I've done fewer than my normal quota of futile things this week, I
thought I'd post to remind people that ...
t/data/python_quotes.txt view on Meta::CPAN
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
"I do not love thee, lambda; let me count the ways..."
-- Aahz Maruch, 27 Sep 2000
They are called "Exceptions" because to any policy for handling them, imposed
in advance upon all programmers by the computer system, some programmers will
have good reason to take exception.
-- William Kahan, quoted by Tim Peters, 13 Oct 2000
"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
technology was so primitive, he carefully planned his photographs and developed
discipline so he could reliably make excellent photographs over and over.
-- Greg Jorgensen, 26 Nov 2000
As you might have guessed, I didn't do this just for fun. It is the old game of
explaining what is there, convincing everybody that you at least know what you
are talking about, and then three days later coming up with an improved
application of the theory.
-- Christian Tismer, 11 Dec 2000
Have they sprouted a new timbot, more geared towards newbies, more polite and
friendly maybe, with a touch of human fallibility (hence the occasional slip of
the keyboard) and named it Alex?
-- Carel Fellinger, 12 Dec 2000
I'm spending most of my waking hours understanding this patch -- it is a true
piece of wizardry.
-- GvR, discussing a patch from Neil Schemenauer, 13 Dec 2000
Maybe they took solidity *for granted*, because, in their (Renaissance)
times and in their (Architecture) calling, compromises regarding solidity were
simply unthinkable. Well, we're not so lucky, in the software field, today; the
Firmitas of *by far* most software around is imperfect.
We *must* live by "do the simplest thing that can possibly work" -- give
solidity its proper, foremost place. One of the debilitating factors for much
current software is a misplaced emphasis on assumed 'convenience' (funky GUIs,
quirky shortcuts, special cases aplenty) to the detriment of solidity. A small
but crucial step to reverse this trend, is to start by putting the order right
once more... the way Vitruvius had it!
-- Alex Martelli, 13 Dec 2000
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
'em best when the high-order mantissa bits are all perky and regular, standing
straight up, then go monster insane in the low-order bits, so you can't guess
*what* bit might come next! Man, that's hot. Top it off with an exponent field
with lots of ones, and you don't even need any oil. Can't say I've got a
preference for sign bits, though -- zero and one can both be saucy treats. Zero
is more of a tease, so I guess it depends on the mood."
-- Barry Warsaw and Tim Peters, 3 Feb 2001
We were sincerely hoping that the Python core team would teach their employers
how to code Python, instead of the other way around...
-- Pieter Nagel, 5 Feb 2001
This bug fix brought to you by the letters b, c, d, g, h, ... and the reporter
Ping.
-- Jeremy Hylton in a checkin message for Python/compile.c, 12 Feb
2001
"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
"With genetic engineering being the latest growth industry, I'm not sure
that's true. Although I expect that any new models of cow, etc. will have a
backwards compatible food-consumption protocol."
-- Alex Martelli and Greg Ewing, 19 Apr 2001
This property is called confluence, and the proof is called the Church -Rosser
theorem. I'm sure you know this, of course, but somewhere out there there's a
college student who is being shocked that CS is actually turning out to be
relevant, for sufficiently small values of relevance.
-- Neelakantan Krishnaswami, 20 Apr 2001
if the style mafia finds out, you may find a badly severed list comprehension
in your bed one morning, but I'd say the risk is very low.
-- Fredrik Lundh, 10 May 2001
1495 is a *deservedly* unpopular number. After all, Lorenzo de' Medici ("il
Magnifico") died in 1492, and Giovanni de' Medici ("dalle Bande Nere") wasn't
born until 1498, so 1495 fell right in the middle of a very boring and unusual
lull where no really outstanding member of the Medici family (either branch)
was around.
-- Alex Martelli, 24 May 2001
"What do you call the thing that pops up and says `Searching' or something
to reassure the user that his computer hasn't crashed and the application is
still running?"
"On Windows, that's called 'a miracle'."
-- Laura Creighton and Tim Peters, 28 May 2001
In general, my conclusion after doing numerical work for a while is that the
desire to look at algorithms crucial to your research as black boxes is futile.
In the end, I always had to dig into the details of the algorithms because they
were either never black-boxable or the black-box versions didn't do a good
enough job.
-- David Ascher, 28 May 2001
"Oh, read *all* Kahan has written, and if you emerge still thinking you
*know* what you're doing when floating point is involved, you're either Tim
Peters, or the world champ of hubris."
"I find it's possible to be both <wink>."
-- Alex Martelli and Tim Peters, 20 May 2001
Wow, this almost looks like a real flamefest. ("Flame" being defined as the
presence of metacomments.)
-- GvR, 13 Jun 2001
"Maybe we also have a smaller brain than the typical Lisper -- I would say,
that would make us more normal, and if Python caters to people with a
closer-to-average brain size, that would mean more people will be able to
program in Python. History will decide..."
"I thought it already has, pretty much."
-- GvR and A.M. Kuchling, 14 Jun 2001
Did Guido use the time machine to get a copy of the GoF book before he started
working on the first version of Python, or are Patterns just a transparent
attempt to cover for chronically inexpressive languages like C++ and Java which
can't generally implement these mind-numbingly simple constructs in code?
-- Glyph Lefkowitz, 7 Jun 2001
Google confuses me; if you search for "michael hudson" my page is the third hit
-- but my name doesn't actually appear anywhere on the linked page! The "did
you mean to search for..." feature is also downright uncanny. They've clearly
sold their souls to the devil -- there's no other explanation.
-- Michael Hudson, 28 Jun 2001
You didn't say what you want to accomplish. If the idea of "provably correct"
programs appeals to you, Eiffel will give you more help than any other
practical language I know of. But since your post didn't lay out your
assumptions, your goals, or how you view language characteristics as fitting in
with either, you're not a *natural* candidate for embracing Design by Contract
<0.6 wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 3 Jun 2001
The static people talk about rigorously enforced interfaces, correctness
proofs, contracts, etc. The dynamic people talk about rigorously enforced
testing and say that types only catch a small portion of possible errors. The
static people retort that they don't trust tests to cover everything or not
have bugs and why write tests for stuff the compiler should test for you, so
you shouldn't rely on *only* tests, and besides static types don't catch a
small portion, but a large portion of errors. The dynamic people say no program
or test is perfect and static typing is not worth the cost in language
complexity and design difficulty for the gain in eliminating a few tests that
would have been easy to write anyway, since static types catch a small portion
of errors, not a large portion. The static people say static types don't add
that much language complexity, and it's not design "difficulty" but an
essential part of the process, and they catch a large portion, not a small
portion. The dynamic people say they add enormous complexity, and they catch a
small portion, and point out that the static people have bad breath. The static
people assert that the dynamic people must be too stupid to cope with a real
language and rigorous requirements, and are ugly besides.
This is when both sides start throwing rocks.
-- Quinn Dunkan, 13 Jul 2001
I am becoming convinced that Unicode is a multi-national plot to take over the
minds of our most gifted (and/or most obsessive) programmers, in pursuit of an
elusive, unresolvable, and ultimately, undefinable goal.
-- Ken Manheimer, 19 Jul 2001
Unicode is the first technology I have to deal with which makes me hope I die
before I really really *really* need to understand it fully.
-- David Ascher, 19 Jul 2001
Moore's law is slowly making type declarations irrelevant...
-- Paul Prescod, 29 Jul 2001
The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time
on when you realize it's pointless.
-- Bram Cohen, 20 Sep 2001
Generators and iterators are among the most loving features ever introduced.
They will give and give, without ever asking anything from you save the
privilege of gracing your code, waiting with eager anticipation for you to
resume them at your pleasure, or even to discard them if you tire of their
charms. In fact, they're almost pathologically yielding.
-- Tim Peters, 18 Oct 2001
IMO a bunch of the frustration I sometimes feel with Python comes from its
originally being intended as a "glue" language. It's too good for that, and
finds itself used as a work horse or even a race horse. Neither type of horse
belongs in the glue factory ;-).
-- Paul Rubin, 30 Oct 2001
"Which inevitably has the followup rhyme 'There was a young man from
Verdun'."
"But somehow no one ever seems to be able to remember what it was about the
man from Abdero."
-- Simon Callan and Gareth McCaughan, 04 Nov 2001, after someone
quoted the limerick "There was a young man from Wooloomooloo /
Whose limericks always finished on line two."
Sometimes I feel like I'm reinventing Zope, but at least it's a Zope I
understand.
-- Quinn Dunkan, 05 Nov 2001 on the quixote-users list
Homological algebra beckons -- brain relief in this context!
-- Michael Hudson, 07 Nov 2001, in a discussion of Stackless Python
If you're talking "useful", I'm not your bot.
-- Tim Peters, 08 Nov 2001
"How do you do a range of floats?"
"Bring flowers, and buy them all nice dinners. Try not to be *too* obvious
that you're out to do them, though."
-- Thomas Wouters and Tim Peters, 09 Nov 2001
Changing diapers reminded Guido that he wanted to allow for some measure of
multiple inheritance from a mix of new- and classic-style classes.
-- Tim Peters in a checkin message, 14 Nov 2001
My late father-in-law, Ray Pigozzi, was an extremely talented architect (he was
made a fellow of the AIA in the late 70's or early 80's), and although he was
by all accounts an excellent mentor to younger architects in the firm he
cofounded, he also had the well- deserved reputation of being quite laconic
(this I know from personal experience ;-). Early in his career, he received an
award from some masonry organization for his use of brick in building OWP (now
OWP&P) had designed. This necessitated the usual awards ceremony with dinner
and speeches. The recipients who preceeded Ray to the podium all spoke at
length about their work. Ray's entire acceptance speech was, "The building
speaks for itself."
-- Skip Montanaro, 4 Jan 2002
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
( run in 0.232 second using v1.01-cache-2.11-cpan-00829025b61 )