We will perhaps eventually be writing only small modules which are identified
by name as they are used to build larger ones, so that devices like
indentation, rather than delimiters, might become feasible for expressing local
structure in the source language.
-- Donald E. Knuth, "Structured Programming with goto Statements",
Computing Surveys, Vol 6 No 4, Dec. 1974
Python's syntax succeeds in combining the mistakes of Lisp and Fortran. I do
not construe that as progress.
-- Larry Wall, May 12 2004
Some rejected alternate names for "Monty Python's Flying Circus":
1 2 3 / It's Them! / Arthur Megapode's Flying Circus / The Horrible Earnest
Megapode / The Panic Show / The Plastic Mac Show / Ow! It's Colin Plint! /
Vaseline Review / Vaseline Parade / The Keen Show / Brian's Flying Circus / The
Year of the Stoat / Cynthia Fellatio's Flying Circus / Owl Stretching Time /
The Whizzo Easishow! (Guaranteed to last 1/2 hour! Money back if not!)
-- From Kim "Howard" Johnson's _Life Before and After Monty Python_.
It's interesting to contemplate what Python would have been called
if one of these names had been chosen.
Anybody else on the list got an opinion? Should I change the language or not?
-- Guido van Rossum, 28 Dec 1991
in-any-case-the-best-christmas-present-i-got-today!-ly y'rs - tim
-- Tim Peters, 29 Dec 1991 [First occurrence of Tim Peters's long-
phrase-ly idiom.]
but-i'm-not-even-motivated-enough-to-finish-this-sig-
-- Tim Peters, 20 Dec 2000
Ha -- you have done me the favor of underestimating my ignorance <smile>.
-- Tim Peters, 30 Dec 1991
I prefer (all things being equal) regularity/orthogonality and logical
syntax/semantics in a language because there is less to have to remember. (Of
course I *know* all things are NEVER really equal!)
-- Guido van Rossum, 6 Dec 1991
The details of that silly code are irrelevant.
-- Tim Peters, 4 Mar 1992
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, 7 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, 8 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 1993 [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 1993
I've seen Python criticized as "ugly" precisely because it *doesn't* have a
trick-based view of the world. In many ways, it's a dull language, borrowing
solid old concepts from many other languages & styles: boring syntax,
unsurprising semantics, few automatic coercions, etc etc. But that's one of the
things I like about it.
-- Tim Peters, 16 Sep 1993
One of the things that makes it interesting, is exactly how much Guido has
managed to exploit that *one* implementation trick of 'namespaces'.
-- Steven D. Majewski, 17 Sep 1993
Anyone familiar with Modula-3 should appreciate the difference between a
layered approach, with generic Rd/Wr types, and the Python 'C with foam
padding' approach.
-- John Redford, 24 Nov 1993
People simply will not agree on what should and shouldn't be "an error", and
once exception-handling mechanisms are introduced to give people a choice, they
will far less agree on what to do with them.
-- Tim Peters, 17 Dec 1993
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, 1 Aug 1994
I don't know a lot about this artificial life stuff -- but I'm suspicious
of anything Newsweek gets goofy about -- and I suspect its primary use is as
another money extraction tool to be applied by ai labs to the department of
defense (and more power to 'em).
Nevertheless in wondering why free software is so good these days it
occurred to me that the propagation of free software is one gigantic artificial
life evolution experiment, but the metaphor isn't perfect.
Programs are thrown out into the harsh environment, and the bad ones die.
The good ones adapt rapidly and become very robust in short order.
The only problem with the metaphor is that the process isn't random at all.
Python *chooses* to include Tk's genes; Linux decides to make itself more
suitable for symbiosis with X, etcetera.
Free software is artificial life, but better.
-- Aaron Watters, 29 Sep 1994
I claim complete innocence and ignorance! It must have been Tim. I wouldn't
know a Trondheim Hammer if it fell on my foot!
-- Steve Majewski, 10 Jan 1995
(Aieee! Yet another thing on my TODO pile!)
-- A.M. Kuchling, 10 Jan 1995
[After someone wrote "...assignment capability, a la djikstra"] Ehh, the poor
old man's name is Dijkstra. I should know, "ij" is a well known digraph in the
Dutch language. And before someone asks the obvious: his famous "P and V" names
for semaphores are derived for the Dutch words "Passeer" and "Verlaat", or
"Pass" and "Leave". And no, I haven't met him (although he did work at CWI back
in the fifties when it was called, as it should still be today, Mathematical
Centre). he currently lives in Austin, Texas I believe. (While we're at it...
does anybody remember the Dijkstra font for Macintoshes? It was a scanned
version of his handwriting. I believe Luca Cardelli scanned it -- the author of
Obliq, a somewhat Python-like distributed language built on Modula-3. I could
go on forever... :-)
-- Guido van Rossum, 19 Jan 1995
As always, I'll leave it to a volunteer to experiment with this.
-- Guido van Rossum, 20 Jan 1995
Non-masochists, please delete this article NOW.
-- Aaron Watters, 20 Jan 1995
If Perl weren't around, I'd probably be using Python right now.
-- Tom Christiansen in comp.lang.perl, 2 Jun 1995
GUI stuff is *supposed* to be hard. It builds character.
-- Jim Ahlstrom, at one of the early Python workshops
>VERY cool mod, Peter. I'll be curious to see GvR's reaction to your
syntax.
Hm.
-- Nick Seidenman and Guido van Rossum, 1 Aug 1996
Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom
and nobody can read another's code; too little and expressiveness is
endangered.
-- Guido van Rossum, 13 Aug 1996
[On regression testing] Another approach is to renounce all worldly goods and
retreat to a primitive cabin in Montana, where you can live a life of purity,
unpolluted by technological change. But now and then you can send out little
packages....
-- Aaron Watters
Ah, you're a recent victim of forceful evangelization. Write your own assert
module, use it, and come back in a few months to tell me whether it really
caught 90% of your bugs.
-- Guido van Rossum, 7 Feb 1997
The larger scientific computing centers generally have a "theory" division and
a "actually uses the computer" <wink> division. The theory division generally
boasts some excellent theoreticians and designers, while the other division
generally boasts some excellent physical scientists who simply want to get
their work done. In most labs I've seen, the two divisions hate each others'
guts (or, rarely, blissfully ignore each other), & the politics is so thick you
float on it even after they embed your feet in cement blocks (hence even the
simple relief of death is denied you <wink>).
-- Tim Peters, 25 Mar 1997
In one particular way the conflict is fundamental & eternal: the "working
scientists" generally understand the hardware du jour perfectly, and
passionately resent any attempt to prevent them from fiddling with it directly
-- while the theory folks are forever inventing new ways to hide the hardware
du jour. That two groups can both be so right and so wrong at the same time is
my seventh proof for the existence of God ...
-- Tim Peters, 25 Mar 1997
You're going to be in a minority - you're coming to Python programming from a
language which offers you a lot more in the way of comfortable operations than
Python, instead of coming from medieval torture chambers like C or Fortran,
which offer so much less.
-- Andrew Mullhaupt, 26 Jun 1997
...although Python uses an obsolete approach to memory management, it is a
*good* implementation of that approach, as opposed to S, which uses a
combination of bad implementation and demented design decisions to arrive at
what may very well be the worst memory behavior of any actually useful program.
-- Andrew Mullhaupt, 26 Jun 1997
I suggested holding a "Python Object Oriented Programming Seminar", but the
acronym was unpopular.
-- Joseph Strout, 28 Feb 1997
Strangely enough I saw just such a beast at the grocery store last night.
Starbucks sells Javachip. (It's ice cream, but that shouldn't be an obstacle
for the Java marketing people.)
-- Jeremy Hylton, 29 Apr 1997
A little girl goes into a pet show and asks for a wabbit. The shop keeper
looks down at her, smiles and says:
"Would you like a lovely fluffy little white rabbit, or a cutesy wootesly
little brown rabbit?"
"Actually", says the little girl, "I don't think my python would notice."
-- Told by Nick Leaton, 4 Dec 1996
When I originally designed Perl 5's OO, I thought about a lot of this stuff,
and chose the explicit object model of Python as being the least confusing. So
far I haven't seen a good reason to change my mind on that.
-- Larry Wall, 27 Feb 1997 on perl5-porters
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
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 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, 1 Oct 1998
E.g., at the REBOL prompt I typed
send tim@email.msn.com "Did this work?"
and in response it dialed my modem, connected to my ISP, and then REBOL
crashed after provoking an invalid page fault in kernel32.dll. Then my
connection broke, and the modem dialed and connected again. Then it just sat
there until it timed out.
now-*that's*-user-friendly<wink>-ly y'rs
-- Tim Peters, 24 Sep 1998
I've reinvented the idea of variables and types as in a programming language,
something I do on every project.
-- Greg Ward, September 1998
"The event/tree dualism reminds me why I always wanted to be able to do
pattern matching on trees."
"'Honey, what is this guy doing up there?' 'Oh, I suppose it's Christian,
trying to match some patterns.' "
-- Christian Tismer and Dirk Heise, 12 Oct 1998
Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.
-- Larry Wall, 14 Oct 1998
"What's the opinion of the (wink) Python luminaries?"
"The last time I saw a position paper from them, they came out strongly
against the suggestion that old people be put on ice floes and left to drift
out to sea to die.
they-never-like-*any*-of-my-ideas-ly y'rs"
-- Stuart Hungerford and Tim Peters, 14 Oct 1998
Rather than borrowing from our beauty-impaired ugly sibling, why not look at
Java, the beautiful, conceited sister? We could have something more like
JavaDoc.
-- Paul Prescod, 18 Oct 1998
It won't work. This is far too concrete a problem to interest Tim. I see 3
possible approaches:
1) Claim that Python can't do a <some random combination of 'L', 'R', 'A'>
grammar. This will yield an irate response from Aaron which will draw Tim into
it and you'll get a solution in 3 months after lots of entertaining posts.
2) Turn it into an optimization problem and get a solution from Marc- Andre
using mxTextTools next week.
3) Turn it into an obfuscation problem and get competing solutions from
Greg Stein and Fredrik tomorrow morning.
if-anybody's-found-don-beaudry's-sucker-button-let-me-know ly 'yrs
-- Gordon McMillan, 16 Oct 1998
To my battle-scarred mind, documentation is never more than a hint. Read it
once with disbelief suspended, and then again with full throttle skepticism.
-- Gordon McMillan, 19 Oct 1998
Then let the record show that I hereby formally lobby for such an
optimization! I'd lay out some arguments, except that it's already implemented
<wink>.
well-*that*-one-went-easy-ly y'rs - tim
-- Tim Peters, 20 Oct 1998
We did requirements and task analysis, iterative design, and user testing.
You'd almost think programming languages were an interface between people and
computers.
-- Steven Pemberton, one of the designers of Python's direct ancestor
ABC
Not at all, although I agree here too <wink>. It's like saying a fork is broken
just because it's not that handy for jacking up a car. That is, Guido
implemented the syntax to support default arguments, and it works great for
that purpose! Using it to fake closures is a hack, and the "hey, this is cool!"
/ "hey, this really sucks!" mixed reaction thus follows, much as pain follows a
car falling on your skull. Stick to stabbing peas, or even teensy pea-sized
closures, and a fork serves very well.
-- Tim Peters, 31 Oct 1998
My customers consider it a marketable skill that I a) think for myself b) share
my thoughts with them.
-- Paul Prescod, 2 Nov 1998
Anyone else know what a Stanley #45 plane is? ... it's not what you use if
you aren't looking to produce intricate moldings. If you want to make a
tabletop flat, and bring out the natural beauty of the wood, you use a big,
long and flat bench plane. The beauty is in the wood, not the tool, the tool is
just the right one to let you see that and to let others see it too.
And that's a very impressive kind of beauty in itself, isn't it? The kind
of beauty some say is homely--an uninteresting face, boring angles, few if any
parts, no curly flowers. It's just a tool, and not beautiful at all. But look,
that tool makes beauty. It makes it *easy* to make beautiful things, to see
deep into the the grain of whatever material you're working.
Maybe it gets us a little closer to art.
-- Ivan Van Laningham, 3 Nov 1998
You might think "That's illegal." That's not illegal; that's *cool*.
-- Paul Dubois at IPC7, on recursive template definitions in C++
This supports reflection, which is the 90s way of writing self- modifying code.
-- John Aycock at IPC7, during his parsing talk
It turns out that docstrings are the only way to associate information with
functions, which is what led you to abuse them in such a fascinating and
stomach-churning way.
-- Jim Hugunin at IPC7, on embedding BNF parsing rules in docstrings
"The Mayans looked on the integers as gods."
"What did the Mayans think of integer division?"
-- Ivan Van Laningham and an unknown audience member at IPC7
Y2K problem? The Mayans didn't have a *millennium*-2K problem!
-- Eric S. Raymond at IPC7, on learning that the Mayan calendar takes
28 octillion years to wrap around
"Generic identifier" -- think about it too much and your head explodes.
-- Sean McGrath at IPC7, discussing SGML terminology
Nothing I've ever written has reached 1.0.
-- Greg Ward at IPC7, on using small version numbers
Well, that's a little thing -- the specification.
-- Guido van Rossum at IPC7
"We've got a name (Module Distribution Utilities) that gives us a good
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 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 ...
-- Phil Austin, 9 Dec 1999
There are useful diagrams in UML, (eg, the state and transition diagrams).
Unfortunately, the one most tools use to generate code (and draw from reverse
engineering) has everything to do with language structure, and nothing to do
with what actually happens at runtime. To put it bluntly: people spend most of
their time designing the wrong thing. Worse, they get it wrong, but it's carved
in stone now; so the final system is either needlessly complex and marginally
functional, or bears no resemblance to the "design".
-- Gordon McMillan, 15 Dec 1999
The secret to good performance is to prototype and prototype, then code the
bottlenecks in a faster language. The secret to large systems is to prototype
and prototype, until you've got clean separation of the system into managable
pieces, then code in whatever language most suits the need of each piece.
-- Gordon McMillan, 15 Dec 1999
When Jim [Fulton] says "tricky" it means your brain could explode.
-- Michel Pelletier, 15 Dec 1999
You have start-tags, attributes, end-tags and character data. We have all seen
"XML applications" and "XML parsers" which handle this gang- of-four concepts.
... Now we can peer over the parapet and shout "your parser smells of
elderberries" or "I wave my mixed content at your ankles", as long as we like
but the simple gang-of-four base apps will not go away.
-- Sean McGrath, 19 Dec 1999
Abstraction is one of those notions that Python tosses out the window, yet
expresses very well.
-- Gordon McMillan, 6 Jan 2000
The set of naming conventions has a cardinality equal to the number of Python
users.
-- Gordon McMillan, 6 Jan 2000
The way to build large Python applications is to componentize and
loosely-couple the hell out of everything.
-- Aahz Maruch, 6 Jan 2000
It's not the mail volume that bothers me -- I can ignore 100s of messages a day
very quickly. It's the time it takes to respond to all of them.
-- Guido van Rossum, 20 Jan 2000
This is the way of Haskell or Design by Contract of Eiffel. This one is like
wearing a XV century armor, you walk very safely but in a very tiring way.
-- Manuel Gutierrez Algaba, 26 Jan 2000
Life's better without braces.
-- Unofficial motto of IPC8, coined by Bruce Eckel
"Aggressive" means "sometimes wrong".
-- John Aycock at IPC8, during his "Agressive Type Inferencing" talk
Do I do everything in C++ and teach a course in advanced swearing?
-- David Beazley at IPC8, on choosing a language for teaching
Alice is 3D Logo on steroids.
-- Randy Pausch at IPC8
I was willing to grant this one at once, but, now that I look back at it all --
the loyalty oaths, the relentless self-criticism sessions, the midnight visits
from the Ministry of Love -- I'm afraid what we really have here is unspeakably
more sinister.
-- Tim Peters after a reference to "Python's cult-like following", 2
Feb 2000
Guido (like us!) is a bit schizophrenic here: he wants to be a benevolent
dictator, but also wants to treat people like grownups. This probably worked
better before Python got a large American audience <0.9 wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 10 Feb 2000
I have formal proofs that any change of the indentation rules results in 35%
increase of the page faults for only 63.7% of the cache misses. The net effect
is an overall slowdown of 10%.
-- Vladimir Marangozov after Yet Another indentation flamewar, 16 Feb
2000
... let me just say that my least-favourite Python error message is
"SyntaxError: invalid syntax", which somehow manages to be both overly terse
and redundant at the same time.
-- Greg Ward, 15 Feb 2000
See, functional programmers are an insular lot. You rarely see them in
public, except at parades when they all have antler- hats and silly shoes on.
So they completely missed the infamous "goto considered harmful" thread and
didn't even realize they were doing anything wrong.
Now, let's pretend you're writing a 'bot that can pass as a functional
programmer. There's a complex protocol here. When two functional programmers
see each other on the street, they recognize each other by the antler hats. But
in certain parts of the Midwest, regular people wear antler hats, too. So
there's a protocol. First a <wink wink>. Then the secret handshake. Then you
sniff each other's armpits and stamp your foot 3 times.
OK, so you've written a bot, and it works fine on the street. Now you send
it to a cocktail party. It sees a potential functional programmer and gives the
<wink wink>. Now it tries to move into position to do the secret handshake, but
discovers that it's antler-hat is entangled with someone else's. Oops. <wink
wink> at the new guy. Handshake. But before it can sniff, the first one has
moved up for his handshake. Ay yi yi. Your bot crashes and is exposed.
So now you rewrite your bot to use a finite state machine so it can handle
multiple sessions. That means throwing out all the code that worked on the
street. But if you'd used continuations, it would be a relatively minor
adjustment of that code. 'Course you wouldn't have had to write the bot to
begin with.
-- Gordon McMillan, 18 Feb 2000
IIRC, Guido went to CNRI to work on bots and agents or something similar. Could
the timbot and the effbot be an offshoot of that? Next, he's going to start a
company with timbot and effbot as the main products. Van Rossum's Universal
Robots?
-- Bernhard Herzog, 21 Feb 2000
So those are the extremes: Boehm-Demers-Weiser avoids blame by refusing to do
anything. Java avoids blame by exposing an impossibly baroque
implementation-driven finalization model. Scheme avoids blame by refusing to do
anything "by magic", but helps you to shoot yourself with the weapon of your
choice. The bad news is that I don't know of a scheme *not* at an extreme!
-- Tim Peters on the knotty problem of finalizers and cycles, 3 Mar
2000
It's extremely un-Pythonic to let things leak (despite that it has let things
leak for a decade <wink>), but also extremely un-Pythonic to make some wild-ass
guess.
-- Tim Peters on garbage collection, 3 Mar 2000
IOW, the only people who lose under this scheme are the ones begging to lose,
and their "loss" consists of taking responsibility.
-- Tim Peters, 3 Mar 2000
An axiom is accepted without proof: we have plenty of proof that there's no
thoroughly good answer (i.e., every language that has ever addressed this issue
-- along with every language that ever will <wink>).
-- Tim Peters on garbage collection, 3 Mar 2000
I can see the FAQ now...
Q1.1.2.3: Why can't I divide integers?
A: You drooling moron! You need a 10-page owners manual and instructional
video to handle the notational complexity of Tic-Tacs, don't you? As every
schoolboy knows, the integers are a *ring*, not a field, you simpering
simpleton. Oh wait! Let me guess! I have to spell it out for you, you festering
wombat boil. You can't divide integers by integers and get integers. Understand
now? Now go out there and don't do it. And read Herstein, while you're at it.
-- Johann Hibschman, 4 Mar 2000
Actually, I believe you understand me fine, you'd just rather not believe it:
floating point sucks, rationals suck, refusing to allow int division sucks, the
constructive reals suck, symbolic manipulation sucks, ..., but all in different
ways for different reasons. Every one bristles with its own brands of both
shallow and deep "surprises". So it goes -- seeking to represent the infinite
by the finite is an inherently unreachable goal. This is also why people die
<wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 4 Mar 2000
The reason I'm right is that I said there won't be any *single* "survivor"
of the evolutionary struggle, and that the efforts to crown one's favorite as
such are just so much noise. The software ecosystem of the foreseeable future
will always have its own form of "diversity": there will be lions *and*
elephants *and* fish *and* seals *and* birds, because there will be many
diverse "habitats" where the particular adaptations of each will be
needed/advantageous.
The reasoned debates (as opposed to religious wars) may lead to lions with
opposable thumbs, or elephants that can see in the infrared, but there will
never be a 2000-pound fish with a mane and wings. Well, not outside the lab,
anyway.
-- Ran, 5 Mar 2000
"Complexity" seems to be a lot like "energy": you can *transfer* it from the
end user to one/some of the other players, but the total amount seems to remain
pretty much constant for a given task.
-- Ran, 5 Mar 2000
LaTeX2HTML is pain.
-- Fred Drake in a documentation checkin message, 14 Mar 2000
Here, have some cycles of reversed kielbasa. And ten (10 (0xa (101010b)))
Usenet Points, redeemable in comp.lang.python for increased local prestige.
Some prestige may depend upon your own actions. Local Prestige may or may not
have any effect on your actual life (or lack thereof).
-- William Tanksley, 21 Mar 2000
Mucking with builtins is fun the way huffing dry erase markers is fun. Things
are very pretty at first, but eventually the brain cell lossage will more than
outweigh that cheap thrill.
-- Barry Warsaw, 23 Mar 2000
>Have you ever looked at the output of a bib | tbl | eqn pipeline?
Are you kids still using that as a pick-up line?
-- Roy Smith and Cameron Laird, 4 Apr 2000
This is like getting lost in a dictionary. What does quincuncial mean anyhow?
-- Dennis Hamilton, 4 Apr 2000
UTF-8 has a certain purity in that it equally annoys every nation, and is
nobody's default encoding.
-- Andy Robinson, 10 Apr 2000
"Now if we could figure out where python programmers are from, someone
could write a book and get rich."
"Yorkshire."
-- Quinn Dunkan and Warren Postma, 11 Apr 2000
If I didn't have my part-time performance art income to help pay the bills, I
could never afford to support my programming lifestyle.
-- Jeff Bauer, 21 Apr 2000
Of course, this brought me face to face once again with Python's _pons
asinorum_, the significance of whitespace.
-- Eric S. Raymond, in the _Linux Journal_'s Python supplement
Surprisingly enough, Python has taught me more about Lisp than Lisp ever did
;-).
-- Glyph Lefkowitz, 3 May 2000
How about we notate the hungarian notation with the type of hungarian notation,
you know, hungarian meta notation: HWND
aWin32ApiHandleDefinedInWindowsDotH_hwndWindowHandle;
-- Warren Postma, 4 May 2000
Note that Python's licence is in fact the MIT X11 licence, with MIT filed off
and CNRI written in its place in crayon.
-- A.M. Kuchling, 5 May 2000
Once you've read and understood _The Art of the Metaobject Protocol_ you are
one quarter of the way to provisional wizard status. (The other three-fourths
are b) understanding Haskell's monads, c) grokking Prolog, and d) becoming
handy with a combinator- based language by implementing a Forth.)
-- Neel Krishnaswami, 9 May 2000
"The future" has arrived but they forgot to update the docs.
-- R. David Murray, 9 May 2000
/* This algorithm is from a book written before the invention of structured
programming... */
-- Comment in parser/pgen.c, noted by Michael Hudson
For more information please see my unpublished manuscript on steam driven
turing machines. [2000pp in crayon donated to the harvard library -- they never
told me whether they filed it under mathematics, philosophy, logic, mechanical
engineering, or computational science]
-- Aaron Watters, 12 May 2000
Me? I hate the whole lambda calculus, not because of what it is, but
because of what many people think it is. They think that it's the whole of
computer science, the ultimate way to express and reason about programs, when
in reality it's merely a shabby and incomplete model of how Fortran fails to
work. The first thing SICP has to do is teach everyone how bad the lambda
calculus model is -- as part of teaching them about a language allegedly based
on lambda calculus.
I'm sorry, was my bias showing again? :-)
-- William Tanksley, 13 May 2000
I never got beyond starting the data-structures in C++, I never got beyond
seeing how it would work in Scheme. I finished it in one Python -filled
afternoon, and discovered the idea sucked big time. I was glad I did it in
Python, because it only cost me one afternoon to discover the idea sucks.
-- Moshe Zadka, 13 May 2000
In truth, we use 'j' to represent sqrt(-1) for exactly the same reason we use a
convention for the direction of current which is exactly the opposite of the
direction the electrons actually travel: because it drives physicists crazy.
(And if we pick up a few mathematicians or whatever along the way, well, that's
just gravy. ;-)
-- Grant R. Griffin, 14 May 2000
Unicode: everyone wants it, until they get it.
-- Barry Warsaw, 16 May 2000
I saw a hack you sent me a few months ago and approved of its intent and was
saddened by its necessity.
-- Jim Fulton, 16 May 2000
Suspicions are most easily dispelled/confirmed via evidence, and taking the
trouble to do this has the pleasant side-effect that you can either cease
expending effort worrying, or move directly to taking positive action to
correct the problem.
-- Neel Krishnaswami, 21 May 2000
Thanks to the overnight turnaround and the early interpreter's habit of
returning nothing at all useful if faced with a shortage of )s, one could
easily detect the LISP users: they tended to walk around with cards full of
)))))))... in their shirt pockets, to be slapped onto the end of submitted card
decks: one at least got something back if there were too many )s.
-- John W. Baxter, 21 May 2000
Python: embodies a harmony of chocolate kisses with hints of jasmine and rose.
Trussardi's wild new fragrance.
-- From _Marie Claire_, Australian edition, May 2000; noted by Fiona
Czuczman
In arts, compromises yield mediocre results. The personality and vision of the
artist has to go through. I like to see Python as a piece of art. I just hope
the artist will not get too tainted by usability studies.
-- François Pinard, 22 May 2000
In fact, I've never seen an argument about which I cared less. I'm completely
case insensitivity insensitive.
-- William Tanksley, 23 May 2000
They boo-ed when Dylan went electric. But for me its about the instincts of a
designer, and the faith of a fan. Not science. So much the better.
-- Arthur Siegel, 23 May 2000
Burroughs did something very odd with COBOL at one point (and no, it wasn't The
Naked Lunch).
-- Will Rose, 27 May 2000
Code generators are hacks. Sometimes necessary hacks, but hacks nevertheless.
-- Paul Prescod, 7 Jun 2000
Very rough; like estimating the productivity of a welder by the amount of
acetylene used.
-- Paul Svensson, on measuring programmer productivity by lines of
code, 19 Jun 2000
I vote for backward compatibility for now, and not only because that will
irritate /F the most.
-- Tim Peters, 30 Jun 2000
A comment is in order then. If the code is smarter than it looks, most people
aren't going to think it looks very smart.
-- Jeremy Hylton, 6 Jul 2000
You and I think too much alike ?!ng. And if that doesn't scare you now, you
should have a talk with Gordon.
-- Barry Warsaw, 12 Jul 2000
Isn't it somewhat of a political statement to allow marriages of three or more
items? I always presumed that this function was n-ary, like map().
-- Paul Prescod, on the proposed name marry() for a function to
combine sequences, 12 Jul 2000
Since my finger was slowest reaching my nose, I got elected Editor. On the
positive side of that, I get to make the early decisions that will be cursed
for generations of Python hackers to come.
-- Barry Warsaw, 12 Jul 2000
Hey, you know, we can work this in. Sailor Moon + Giant Robots + Tentacle
Demons + Python Conference == Bizarre hilarity ensues!
-- Alexander Williams, 4 Aug 2000
The rapid establishment of social ties, even of a fleeting nature, advance not
only that goal but its standing in the uberconscious mesh of communal psychic,
subjective, and algorithmic interbeing. But I fear I'm restating the obvious.
-- Will Ware, 28 Aug 2000
The comp.lang.python newsgroup erupted last week with a flurry of posts that
accused the Python development team of creeping featurism, selling out the
language to corporate interests, moving too fast, and turning a deaf ear to the
Python community. What triggered this lava flow of accusations? The development
team accepted a proposal to change the syntax of the print statement.
-- Stephen Figgins, 30 Aug 2000
INTERVIEWER: Tell us how you came to be drawn into the world of pragmas.
COMPILER WRITER: Well, it started off with little things. Just a few
boolean flags, a way to turn asserts on and off, debug output, that sort of
thing. I thought, what harm can it do? It's not like I'm doing anything you
couldn't do with command line switches, right? Then it got a little bit
heavier, integer values for optimisation levels, even the odd string or two.
Before I knew it I was doing the real hard stuff, constant expressions,
conditionals, the whole shooting box. Then one day when I put in a hook for
making arbitrary calls into the interpreter, that was when I finally realised I
had a problem...
-- Greg Ewing, 31 Aug 2000
The modules people have built for Python are like the roads the Romans built
through Europe. On this solid ground, you can move fast as you work on aspects
of program design that aren't so analytical -- user interface, multi-threaded
event dispatching models, all kinds of things that can be done a lot of
different ways and are hard to get right the first time through.
-- Donn Cave, 3 Sep 2000
Python 2.0 beta 1 is now available from BeOpen PythonLabs. There is a long list
of new features since Python 1.6, released earlier today. We don't plan on any
new releases in the next 24 hours.
-- Jeremy Hylton, in the 2.0b1 announcement, 5 Sep 2000
Fortunately, you've left that madness behind, and entered the clean, happy, and
safe Python world of transvestite lumberjacks and singing Vikings.
-- Quinn Dunkan, 17 Sep 2000
Regular expressions are among my most valued tools, along with goto, eval,
multiple inheritance, preemptive multithreading, floating point, run-time type
identification, a big knife, a bottle of bleach, and 120VAC electricity. All of
these things suck sometimes.
-- Kragen Sitaker, 27 Sep 2000
IIRC, he didn't much care for regexps before, but actually writing a regexp
engine drives most people who do it to intense hatred.
Just more of the magic of Python! Transmuting a few peoples' intense agony
into the subject of others' idle amusement <wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 27 Sep 2000
"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
Stackless Python: programming the way Guido prevented it.
-- Christian Tismer's title slide, at IPC9
I don't think we should use rational numbers for money because money isn't
rational.
-- Moshe Zadka, at IPC9
We can't stop people from complaining but we can influence what they complain
about.
-- Tim Peters, at IPC9
Perl is like vise grips. You can do anything with it but it is the wrong tool
for every job.
-- Bruce Eckel, at IPC9
Given the choice between a good text editor and a good source control system,
i'll take the source control, and use "cat" to write my code.
-- Greg Wilson, at IPC9
here's the eff-bot's favourite lambda refactoring rule:
1) write a lambda function
2) write a comment explaining what the heck that lambda does
3) study the comment for a while, and think of a name that captures
the essence of the comment
4) convert the lambda to a def statement, using that name
5) remove the comment
-- Fredrik Lundh, 01 Apr 2001
The GPL tried to protect the freedom of end-users to modify and redistribute
their code. Most people do not believe that this is a legitimate freedom like
freedom of speech or assembly but Richard Stallman does. I don't think that
there is an argument that that will persuade a person one way or another. If
freedoms could be proven, that famous document would probably start: "Not
everyone holds these truths to be self-evident, so we've worked up a proof of
them as Appendix A."
-- Paul Prescod, 11 Apr 2001
That is one of the first goals. Also, we want to handle a C++ SAX stream with
Python, and vice versa (feed a Python SAX stream into Xalan). Bi-SAXuality, in
a sense. :)
-- Jürgen Hermann, 11 Apr 2001
As you seem totally unwilling or unable to understand that _Weltanschauung_ to
any extent, I don't see how you could bring Python any constructive enhancement
(except perhaps by some random mechanism akin to monkeys banging away on
typewriters until 'Hamlet' comes out, I guess).
-- Alex Martelli, 17 Apr 2001
"Are we more likely to add different concrete subclasses of Consumable in
the future, or different concrete subclasses of Consumer? I suspect the former
is more likely."
"With genetic engineering being the latest growth industry, I'm not sure
that's true. Although I expect that any new models of cow, etc. will have a
backwards compatible food-consumption protocol."
-- Alex Martelli and Greg Ewing, 19 Apr 2001
This property is called confluence, and the proof is called the Church -Rosser
theorem. I'm sure you know this, of course, but somewhere out there there's a
college student who is being shocked that CS is actually turning out to be
relevant, for sufficiently small values of relevance.
-- Neelakantan Krishnaswami, 20 Apr 2001
if the style mafia finds out, you may find a badly severed list comprehension
in your bed one morning, but I'd say the risk is very low.
-- Fredrik Lundh, 10 May 2001
1495 is a *deservedly* unpopular number. After all, Lorenzo de' Medici ("il
Magnifico") died in 1492, and Giovanni de' Medici ("dalle Bande Nere") wasn't
born until 1498, so 1495 fell right in the middle of a very boring and unusual
lull where no really outstanding member of the Medici family (either branch)
was around.
-- Alex Martelli, 24 May 2001
"What do you call the thing that pops up and says `Searching' or something
to reassure the user that his computer hasn't crashed and the application is
still running?"
"On Windows, that's called 'a miracle'."
-- Laura Creighton and Tim Peters, 28 May 2001
In general, my conclusion after doing numerical work for a while is that the
desire to look at algorithms crucial to your research as black boxes is futile.
In the end, I always had to dig into the details of the algorithms because they
were either never black-boxable or the black-box versions didn't do a good
enough job.
-- David Ascher, 28 May 2001
"Oh, read *all* Kahan has written, and if you emerge still thinking you
*know* what you're doing when floating point is involved, you're either Tim
Peters, or the world champ of hubris."
"I find it's possible to be both <wink>."
-- Alex Martelli and Tim Peters, 20 May 2001
Wow, this almost looks like a real flamefest. ("Flame" being defined as the
presence of metacomments.)
-- GvR, 13 Jun 2001
"Maybe we also have a smaller brain than the typical Lisper -- I would say,
that would make us more normal, and if Python caters to people with a
closer-to-average brain size, that would mean more people will be able to
program in Python. History will decide..."
"I thought it already has, pretty much."
-- GvR and A.M. Kuchling, 14 Jun 2001
Did Guido use the time machine to get a copy of the GoF book before he started
working on the first version of Python, or are Patterns just a transparent
attempt to cover for chronically inexpressive languages like C++ and Java which
can't generally implement these mind-numbingly simple constructs in code?
-- Glyph Lefkowitz, 7 Jun 2001
Google confuses me; if you search for "michael hudson" my page is the third hit
-- but my name doesn't actually appear anywhere on the linked page! The "did
you mean to search for..." feature is also downright uncanny. They've clearly
sold their souls to the devil -- there's no other explanation.
-- Michael Hudson, 28 Jun 2001
You didn't say what you want to accomplish. If the idea of "provably correct"
programs appeals to you, Eiffel will give you more help than any other
practical language I know of. But since your post didn't lay out your
assumptions, your goals, or how you view language characteristics as fitting in
with either, you're not a *natural* candidate for embracing Design by Contract
<0.6 wink>.
-- Tim Peters, 3 Jun 2001
The static people talk about rigorously enforced interfaces, correctness
proofs, contracts, etc. The dynamic people talk about rigorously enforced
testing and say that types only catch a small portion of possible errors. The
static people retort that they don't trust tests to cover everything or not
have bugs and why write tests for stuff the compiler should test for you, so
you shouldn't rely on *only* tests, and besides static types don't catch a
small portion, but a large portion of errors. The dynamic people say no program
or test is perfect and static typing is not worth the cost in language
complexity and design difficulty for the gain in eliminating a few tests that
would have been easy to write anyway, since static types catch a small portion
of errors, not a large portion. The static people say static types don't add
that much language complexity, and it's not design "difficulty" but an
essential part of the process, and they catch a large portion, not a small
portion. The dynamic people say they add enormous complexity, and they catch a
small portion, and point out that the static people have bad breath. The static
people assert that the dynamic people must be too stupid to cope with a real
language and rigorous requirements, and are ugly besides.
This is when both sides start throwing rocks.
-- Quinn Dunkan, 13 Jul 2001
I am becoming convinced that Unicode is a multi-national plot to take over the
minds of our most gifted (and/or most obsessive) programmers, in pursuit of an
elusive, unresolvable, and ultimately, undefinable goal.
-- Ken Manheimer, 19 Jul 2001
Unicode is the first technology I have to deal with which makes me hope I die
before I really really *really* need to understand it fully.
-- David Ascher, 19 Jul 2001
Moore's law is slowly making type declarations irrelevant...
-- Paul Prescod, 29 Jul 2001
The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time
on when you realize it's pointless.
-- Bram Cohen, 20 Sep 2001
Generators and iterators are among the most loving features ever introduced.
They will give and give, without ever asking anything from you save the
privilege of gracing your code, waiting with eager anticipation for you to
resume them at your pleasure, or even to discard them if you tire of their
charms. In fact, they're almost pathologically yielding.
-- Tim Peters, 18 Oct 2001
IMO a bunch of the frustration I sometimes feel with Python comes from its
originally being intended as a "glue" language. It's too good for that, and
finds itself used as a work horse or even a race horse. Neither type of horse
belongs in the glue factory ;-).
-- Paul Rubin, 30 Oct 2001
"Which inevitably has the followup rhyme 'There was a young man from
Verdun'."
"But somehow no one ever seems to be able to remember what it was about the
man from Abdero."
-- Simon Callan and Gareth McCaughan, 04 Nov 2001, after someone
quoted the limerick "There was a young man from Wooloomooloo /
Whose limericks always finished on line two."
Sometimes I feel like I'm reinventing Zope, but at least it's a Zope I
understand.
-- Quinn Dunkan, 05 Nov 2001 on the quixote-users list
Homological algebra beckons -- brain relief in this context!
-- Michael Hudson, 07 Nov 2001, in a discussion of Stackless Python
If you're talking "useful", I'm not your bot.
-- Tim Peters, 08 Nov 2001
"How do you do a range of floats?"
"Bring flowers, and buy them all nice dinners. Try not to be *too* obvious
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
The joy of coding Python should be in seeing short, concise, readable classes
that express a lot of action in a small amount of clear code -- not in reams of
trivial code that bores the reader to death.
-- GvR, 20 Mar 2002
A bot may injure a human being, or, preferably, through inaction, allow a human
being to come to harm, although laughing about either in the hearing of humans
is MACNAM-017B3^H.
-- Tim Peters, 26 Mar 2002
"It works in Scheme" doesn't give me the warm fuzzy feeling that it's been
tried in real life.
-- GvR, 02 Oct 2002
Most recipes are short enough for the attention span of the average Python
programmer.
-- GvR, in the introduction to the _Python Cookbook_
We read Knuth so you don't have to.
-- Tim Peters, _Python Cookbook_
Here's another technique that is faster and more obvious but that is often
avoided by those who mistakenly believe that writing two lines of code where
one might do is somehow sinful.
-- Tim Peters, _Python Cookbook_
A fruitful approach to problem solving is known as "divide and conquer", or
making problems easier by splitting their different aspects apart. Making
problems harder by joining several aspects together must be an example of an
approach known as "unite and suffer!"
-- Alex Martelli, _Python Cookbook_
compromise-is-the-art-of-spreading-misery-ly y'rs
-- Tim Peters, 11 Dec 2002
As for Grail, it was certainly a "hot product" in the Python community in 1995
because of the restricted execution environment which I evaluated for a project
involving mobile software agents. How priorities and trends have changed since
then! Who would have thought that Microsoft Outlook would be the premier
platform for mobile code?
-- Paul Boddie, 16 Jan 2004
I mean, if I think about my open-source contributions, nobody wants to see
talks with these titles:
* The Zope API Reference: Ouch
* A Random Handful Of Bugs I've Fixed In Other Peoples' Code
* An Old Crufty Project I Inherited That Has Zero Relevance To You
* The Joy of Preemptive Abandonware: Release Late, If Ever (or, Software
Design as a Nihilistic Abstract Art Form) (or, Sourceforge as a Medium for
Cryptic Time Capsules)
-- Paul Winkler, 14 Mar 2005
Syntax should not look like grit on my monitor.
-- Anthony Baxter, 02 Jun 2005
Can this not be resolved by carefully adjusting the order of finalization? If
code can be bootstrapped it can be strootbapped.
-- Kristján Jónsson, 30 Jun 2006
Python resembles Lisp like an octopus eye resembles a mammalian eye: they have
lots in common because they're both pretty good solutions to similar problems.
Deciding whether it's Python or Lisp that has the retina fitted back-to-front
is left as an exercise for the reader.
-- Gareth McCaughan, 11 Jul 2006
As Neal said, we are not perfect; bugs happen. If we all gave up on a piece of
software after two bugs we would not be able to turn our computers.
-- Brett Cannon, 13 Jul 2006
... I've come to believe that some people have the personality traits that let
them tolerate redoing the same work over and over again for no reason other
than management "furniture rearranging", whereas others start to resent having
their (working) life repeatedly flashed before their eyes, but in slightly
different colours, over a longer period of time.
-- Paul Boddie, 29 Aug 2006
I am the very model of a modern major database,
For gigabytes of information gathered out in userspace.
For banking applications to a website crackers will deface,
You access me from console or spiffy user interface.
My multi-threaded architecture offers you concurrency,
And loads of RAM for caching things reduces query latency.
The data is correctly typed, a fact that I will guarantee,
Each datum has a data type, it's specified explicitly.
-- Tim Chase, 12 Sep 2006