Python quotes

(Generated from python-quotes.xml)
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
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 91
in-any-case-the-best-christmas-present-i-got-today!-ly y'rs - tim
Tim Peters, 29 Dec 91 [First occurrence of Tim Peters's long-phrase-ly idiom.]
Ha -- you have done me the favor of underestimating my ignorance <smile>.
Tim Peters, 30 Dec 91
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 91
The details of that silly code are irrelevant.
Tim Peters, 4 Mar 92
Frankly, I'd rather not try to compete with Perl in the areas where Perl is best -- it's a battle that's impossible to win, and I don't think it is a good idea to strive for the number of obscure options and shortcuts that Perl has acquired through the years.
Guido van Rossum, 07 Jul 1992
Python is a truly wonderful language. When somebody comes up with a good idea it takes about 1 minute and five lines to program something that almost does what you want. Then it takes only an hour to extend the script to 300 lines, after which it still does almost what you want.
Jack Jansen, 08 Jul 1992
If you have a browser from CERN's WWW project (World-Wide Web, a distributed hypertext system) you can browse a WWW hypertext version of the manual...
Guido van Rossum, 19 Nov 1992 [First mention of the Web on python-list.]
Just a success note for Guido and the list: Python 0.9.9, stdwin, readline, gmp, and md5 all go up on linux 0.99 pl11 without much problems.
Allan Bailey, 2 Aug 93 [First mention of Linux on python-list.]
Rule: "You shouldn't have to open up a black box and take it apart to find out you've been pushing the wrong buttons!" Corollary: "Every black box should have at least TWO blinking lights: "Paper Jam" and "Service Required" (or equivalent)."
Steven D. Majewski, 9 Sep 1993
We've been through a couple of syntax changes, but I have sort of assumed that by the time we get to version 1.0 release, the language, (if not the implementation) will essentially be stable.
Steven D. Majewski, 14 Sep 1993
"Python tricks" is a tough one, cuz the language is so clean. E.g., C makes an art of confusing pointers with arrays and strings, which leads to lotsa neat pointer tricks; APL mistakes everything for an array, leading to neat one-liners; and Perl confuses everything period, making each line a joyous adventure <wink>.
Tim Peters, 16 Sep 93
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 93
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 shold appreciate the difference between a layered approach, with generic Rd/Wr types, and the Python 'C with foam padding' approach.
John Redford, 24 Nov 93
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.
Tim Peters, 17 Dec 93
Note that because of its semantics, 'del' can't be a function: "del a" deletes 'a' from the current namespace. A function can't delete something from the calling namespace (except when written by Steve Majewski :-).
Guido van Rossum, 01 Aug 1994
I don't know a lot about this artificial life stuff -- but I'm suspicious of anything Newsweek gets goofy about -- and I suspect its primary use is as another money extraction tool to be applied by ai labs to the department of defense (and more power to 'em).
Nevertheless in wondering why free software is so good these days it occurred to me that the propagation of free software is one gigantic artificial life evolution experiment, but the metaphor isn't perfect.
Programs are thrown out into the harsh environment, and the bad ones die. The good ones adapt rapidly and become very robust in short order.
The only problem with the metaphor is that the process isn't random at all. Python chooses to include Tk's genes; Linux decides to make itself more suitable for symbiosis with X, etcetera.
Free software is artificial life, but better.
Aaron Watters, 29 Sep 1994
I claim complete innocence and ignorance! It must have been Tim. I wouldn't know a Trondheim Hammer if it fell on my foot!
Steve Majewski, 10 Jan 1995
(Aieee! Yet another thing on my TODO pile!)
A.M. Kuchling, 10 Jan 1995
[After someone wrote "...assignment capability, a la djikstra"] Ehh, the poor old man's name is Dijkstra. I should know, "ij" is a well known digraph in the Dutch language. And before someone asks the obvious: his famous "P and V" names for semaphores are derived for the Dutch words "Passeer" and "Verlaat", or "Pass" and "Leave". And no, I haven't met him (although he did work at CWI back in the fifties when it was called, as it should still be today, Mathematical Centre). he currently lives in Austin, Texas I believe. (While we're at it... does anybody remember the Dijkstra font for Macintoshes? It was a scanned version of his handwriting. I believe Luca Cardelli scanned it -- the author of Obliq, a somewhat Python-like distributed language built on Modula-3. I could go on forever... :-)
Guido van Rossum, 19 Jan 1995
As always, I'll leave it to a volunteer to experiment with this.
Guido van Rossum, 20 Jan 1995
Non-masochists, please delete this article NOW.
Aaron Watters, 20 Jan 1995
If Perl weren't around, I'd probably be using Python right now.
Tom Christiansen in comp.lang.perl, 02 Jun 95
GUI stuff is supposed to be hard. It builds character.
Jim Ahlstrom, at one of the early Python workshops
>VERY cool mod, Peter. I'll be curious to see GvR's reaction to your syntax.
Hm.
Nick Seidenman and Guido van Rossum, 1 Aug 1996
Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom and nobody can read another's code; too little and expressiveness is endangered.
Guido van Rossum, 13 Aug 1996
[On regression testing] Another approach is to renounce all worldly goods and retreat to a primitive cabin in Montana, where you can live a life of purity, unpolluted by technological change. But now and then you can send out little packages....
Aaron Watters
Ah, you're a recent victim of forceful evangelization. Write your own assert module, use it, and come back in a few months to tell me whether it really caught 90% of your bugs.
Guido van Rossum, 7 Feb 1997
The larger scientific computing centers generally have a "theory" division and a "actually uses the computer" <wink> division. The theory division generally boasts some excellent theoreticians and designers, while the other division generally boasts some excellent physical scientists who simply want to get their work done. In most labs I've seen, the two divisions hate each others' guts (or, rarely, blissfully ignore each other), & the politics is so thick you float on it even after they embed your feet in cement blocks (hence even the simple relief of death is denied you <wink>).
Tim Peters, 25 Mar 1997
In one particular way the conflict is fundamental & eternal: the "working scientists" generally understand the hardware du jour perfectly, and passionately resent any attempt to prevent them from fiddling with it directly -- while the theory folks are forever inventing new ways to hide the hardware du jour. That two groups can both be so right and so wrong at the same time is my seventh proof for the existence of God ...
Tim Peters, 25 Mar 1997
You're going to be in a minority - you're coming to Python programming from a language which offers you a lot more in the way of comfortable operations than Python, instead of coming from medieval torture chambers like C or Fortran, which offer so much less.
Andrew Mullhaupt, 26 Jun 1997
...although Python uses an obsolete approach to memory management, it is a _good_ implementation of that approach, as opposed to S, which uses a combination of bad implementation and demented design decisions to arrive at what may very well be the worst memory behavior of any actually useful program.
Andrew Mullhaupt, 26 Jun 1997
I suggested holding a "Python Object Oriented Programming Seminar", but the acronym was unpopular.
Joseph Strout, 28 Feb 1997
Strangely enough I saw just such a beast at the grocery store last night. Starbucks sells Javachip. (It's ice cream, but that shouldn't be an obstacle for the Java marketing people.)
Jeremy Hylton, 29 Apr 1997
A little girl goes into a pet show and asks for a wabbit. The shop keeper looks down at her, smiles and says
"Would you like a lovely fluffy little white rabbit, or a cutesy wootesly little brown rabbit"
"Actually", says the little girl, "I don't think my python would notice"
Nick Leaton, 04 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, 04 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'll 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 97
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
After 1.5 years of Python, I'm still discovering richness (and still unable to understand what the hell Jim Fulton is talking about).
Gordon McMillan, 13 Mar 1998
Tabs are good, spaces are bad and mixing the two just means that your motives are confused and that you don't use enough functions.
John J. Lehmann, 19 Mar 1998
... but whenever optimization comes up, people get sucked into debates about exciting but elaborate schemes not a one of which ever gets implemented; better 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
You need to build a system that is futureproof; it's no good just making a modular system. You need to realize that your system is just going to be a module in some bigger system to come, and so you have to be part of something else, and it's a bit of a way of life.
Tim Berners-Lee, at the WWW7 conference
From gotos to the evolution of life in 10 posts; that's comp.lang.python for you!
A.M. Kuchling, 4 Apr 1998
This is Python! If we didn't care what code looked like, most of us would probably be hacking in some version of Lisp -- which already covered most of Python's abstract semantics way back when Guido was just a wee snakelet frolicking in the lush Amsterdam jungle.
Tim Peters, 24 Apr 1998
The infinities aren't contagious except in that they often appear that way due to to their large size.
Tim Peters on the IEEE 754 floating point standard, 27 Apr 1998
The "of course, while I have no problem with this at all, it's surely too much for a lesser being" flavor of argument always rings hollow to me. Are you personally confused by the meanings for "+" that exist today? Objecting to the variations is a different story; I'm wondering whether you personally stumble over them in practice. I don't; Steven doesn't; I doubt that you do either. I'm betting that almost nobody ever does, in which case those "less nimble colleagues and students" must be supernaturally feeble to merit such concern.
Tim Peters, 29 Apr 1998
"Ideally, IMO, two messages with the same name should have the same meaning but possibly different implementations. Of course, "meaning" is somewhat relative, but the notion that two messages with the same name should have the same 'meaning' is very useful."
"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
You write a great program, regardless of language, by redoing it over & over & over & over, until your fingers bleed and your soul is drained. But if you tell newbies that, they might decide to go off and do something sensible, like bomb defusing<wink>.
Tim Peters, 5 Jun 1998
OO styles help in part because they make it easier to redo large parts over, or, when the moon is shining just right, to steal large parts from someone else. Python helps in many additional ways regardless of style, not least of which in that it hurts less to throw away 50 lines of code than 5,000 <0.5 wink>. The pains, and joys, of programming are qualitatively the same under Python. There's less pain less often, and joy comes quicker. And that's worth a 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, 01 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
"The event/tree dualism reminds me why I always wanted to be able to do pattern matching on trees."
"'Honey, what is this guy doing up there?' 'Oh, I suppose it's Christian, trying to match some patterns.' "
Christian Tismer and Dirk Heise, 12 Oct 1998
Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.
Larry Wall, 14 Oct 1998
"What's the opinion of the (wink) Python luminaries?"
"The last time I saw a position paper from them, they came out strongly against the suggestion that old people be put on ice floes and left to drift out to sea to die.
they-never-like-any-of-my-ideas-ly y'rs"
Stuart Hungerford and Tim Peters, 14 Oct 1998
Rather than borrowing from our beauty-impaired ugly sibling, why not look at Java, the beautiful, conceited sister? We could have something more like JavaDoc.
Paul Prescod, 18 Oct 1998
It won't work. This is far too concrete a problem to interest Tim. I see 3 possible approaches:
1) Claim that Python can't do a <some random combination of 'L', 'R', 'A'> grammar. This will yield an irate response from Aaron which will draw Tim into it and you'll get a solution in 3 months after lots of entertaining posts.
2) Turn it into an optimization problem and get a solution from Marc-Andre using mxTextTools next week.
3) Turn it into an obfuscation problem and get competing solutions from Greg Stein and Fredrik tomorrow morning.
if-anybody's-found-don-beaudry's-sucker-button-let-me-know ly 'yrs
Gordon McMillan, 16 Oct 1998
To my battle-scarred mind, documentation is never more than a hint. Read it once with disbelief suspended, and then again with full throttle skepticism.
Gordon McMillan, 19 Oct 1998
Then let the record show that I hereby formally lobby for such an optimization! I'd lay out some arguments, except that it's already implemented <wink>.
well-that-one-went-easy-ly y'rs - tim
Tim Peters, 20 Oct 1998
We did requirements and task analysis, iterative design, and user testing. You'd almost think programming languages were an interface between people and computers.
Steven Pemberton, one of the designers of Python's direct ancestor ABC
Not at all, although I agree here too <wink>. It's like saying a fork is broken just because it's not that handy for jacking up a car. That is, Guido implemented the syntax to support default arguments, and it works great for that purpose! Using it to fake closures is a hack, and the "hey, this is cool!" / "hey, this really sucks!" mixed reaction thus follows, much as pain follows a car falling on your skull. Stick to stabbing peas, or even teensy pea-sized closures, and a fork serves very well.
Tim Peters, 31 Oct 1998
My customers consider it a marketable skill that I a) think for myself b) share my thoughts with them.
Paul Prescod, 02 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, 03 Nov 1998
You might think "That's illegal." That's not illegal; that's cool.
Paul Dubois at IPC7, on recursive template definitions in C++
This supports reflection, which is the 90s way of writing self-modifying code.
John Aycock at IPC7, during his parsing talk
It turns out that docstrings are the only way to associate information with functions, which is what led you to abuse them in such a fascinating and stomach-churning way.
Jim Hugunin at IPC7, on embedding BNF parsing rules in docstrings
"The Mayans looked on the integers as gods."
"What did the Mayans think of integer division?"
Ivan Van Laningham and an unknown audience member at IPC7
Y2K problem? The Mayans didn't have a millennium-2K problem!
Eric S. Raymond at IPC7, on learning that the Mayan calendar takes 28 octillion years to wrap around
"Generic identifier" -- think about it too much and your head explodes.
Sean McGrath at IPC7, discussing SGML terminology
Nothing I've ever written has reached 1.0.
Greg Ward at IPC7, on using small version numbers
Well, that's a little thing -- the specification.
Guido van Rossum at IPC7
"We've got a name (Module Distribution Utilities) that gives us a good 3-letter acronym to group things under: MDU."
"<thpftbt>"
Greg Ward and Jeremy Hylton at IPC7
Mailman is designed to be extensible and comprehensible. Without comprehensibility, enhancement is self-limiting -- functionality may be improved, but further enhancement gets increasingly difficult.
Ken Manheimer at IPC7
"Generating Usable Installations" -- OK, you've got the GUI SIG.
Barry Warsaw at IPC7, on the choice of name for a SIG to discuss extension building
Performance is a lot like drugs -- it doesn't do much for you, but it occupies a lot of your time.
Jeremy Hylton at IPC7, on the need for a Performance SIG
I made some slides, but they suck, so I won't bother with them.
Andrew Kuchling at IPC7
"What's Python?"
"It's a computer programming language."
"You mean, like DOS?"
Some guy in a bar and Eric S. Raymond (who was wearing a conference T-shirt) at IPC7
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.)
Guido van Rossum, 25 Nov 1998
"My course members are almost all coming from Math, and the first question was 'why isn't it complete?' Just a matter of elegance."
"Oh, don't worry. My background is math. This is actually good for them -- like discovering that Santa Claus doesn't really exist."
Christian Tismer and Guido van Rossum, 2 Dec 1998
One of my cheap entertainments is axiomatizing characterizations of [Tim Peters]. I think I've come up with a minimal one: the only c.l.p poster more concerned with working non-legal code than non-working legal code.
Cameron Laird, 2 Dec 1998
PYTHON = (P)rogrammers (Y)earning (T)o (H)omestead (O)ur (N)oosphere.
Seen in Sean McGrath's .sig, 3 Dec 1998
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.
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>).
Tim Peters, 21 Feb 99
Yes: the code in ntpath.split is too clever to have any hope of working correctly <wink>.
Tim Peters, 19 Mar 99
Thanks. The sooner I get discouraged and quit, the more time I'll save overall.
Frank Sergeant, 28 Mar 1999
I would actively encourage my competition to use Perl.
Sean True, 30 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
Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than right now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
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
... 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