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<p class='quotation' id='q66'>Two things I learned for sure during
a particularly intense acid trip in my own lost youth: (1)
everything is a trivial special case of something else; and, (2)
death is a bunch of blue spheres.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 1 May 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q67'>Well, they will be: "<" will mean
what everyone thinks it means when applied to builtin types, and
will mean whatever __lt__ makes it mean otherwise, except when
__lt__ isn't defined but __cmp__ is in which case it will mean
whatever __cmp__ makes it mean, except when neither __lt__ or
__cmp__ are defined in which case it's still unsettled. I think. Or
isn't that what you meant by "clearly defined"?</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 6 May 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q68'>You write a great program, regardless
of language, by redoing it over & over & over & over,
until your fingers bleed and your soul is drained. But if you tell
newbies <em>that</em>, they might decide to go off and do something
sensible, like bomb defusing<wink>.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 5 Jun 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q69'>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
<em>qualitatively</em> the same under Python. There's less pain
less often, and joy comes quicker. And that's worth a whole
lot.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 5 Jun 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q70'>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.</p>
<p class='source'>Gordon McMillan, 8 Jun 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q71'>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 <em>extremely</em> 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.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 11 Jun 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q72'>It has also been referred to as the
"Don Beaudry <em>hack</em>," 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.</p>
<p class='source'>Guido van Rossum, <cite>Metaclass Programming in
Python 1.5</cite></p>
<p class='quotation' id='q73'>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.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, on python-help, 16 Jun 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q74'>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 <em>clarifying</em> in either case to see just
<em>how</em> raw this particular gimmick can get.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 16 Jun 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q75'>Every language has its partisans,
usually among folks deeply immersed in their particular theology,
triumphant in having divined the inner meaning of some esoteric
operations, like a medieval Jesuit hot on the trail of the final
ontological proof, whose conciseness in solving a single problem
makes them almost swoon with ecstacy at the expected savings of
many keystrokes, as if those very keystrokes represented a lot of
heavy lifting and hauling on their part.</p>
<p class='source'>John Holmgren, 18 Jun 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q76'>> In general, the situation
sucks.
mind-if-i-use-that-as-my-epitaph<wink>?-ly y'rs - tim</p>
<p class='source'>Timothy J. Grant and Tim Peters, 22 Jun 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q77'>> Just for the record, on AIX, the
following C program:
Oh no you don't! I followed AIX threads for
the first year it came out, but eventually decided there was no
future in investing time in baffling discussions that usually ended
with "oh, never mind -- turns out it's a bug" <0.9 wink>.</p>
<p class='source'>Vladimir Marangozov and Tim Peters, 23 Jun
1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q78'>Python - why settle for snake oil
when you can have the <em>whole</em> snake?</p>
<p class='source'>Mark Jackson, 26 Jun 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q79'>The problem I have with "SETL sets"
in Python is the same I have with every other language's "killer
core" in Python: SETL is much more than just "a set type", Eiffel
is much more than just fancy pre- and post- conditions, Perl's
approach to regexps is much more than just its isolated regexp
syntax, Scheme is much more than just first-class functions &
lexical closures, and so on. Good languages aren't random
collections of interchangeable features: they have a philosophy and
internal coherence that's never profitably confused with their
surface features.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 10 Jul 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q80'>"Since I'm so close to the pickle
module, I just look at the pickles directly, as I'm pretty good at
reading pickles."
"As you all can imagine, this trick goes over
really well at parties."</p>
<p class='source'>Jim Fulton and Paul Everitt on the Bobo list, 17
Jul 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q81'>My theory is that the churning of old
threads and reminiscences (Continuations, Icon influences,
old-T-shirts, the pre news-group mailing list archive, whitespace,
closures, .... ) has brought some old messages to the surface, via
some mechanism similar to the way plankton and other nutrients are
cycled in the ocean.</p>
<p class='source'>Steven D. Majewski, 23 Jul 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q82'>In general, Our Guido flees from
schemes that merely change <em>which</em> foot gets blown off
<0.45 caliber wink>. Schemes that remove the firing pin
entirely have a much better, um, shot <wink>.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 25 Jul 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q83'>I don't know what "invert the control
structure" means -- but if it's anything like turning a hamster
inside-out, I would <em>expect</em> it to be messy
<wink>.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 25 Jul 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q84'>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.</p>
<p class='source'>Gordon McMillan, 30 Jul 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q85'>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.</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 6 Aug 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q86'>I wonder what Guido thinks he might
do in Python2 (assuming, of course, that he doesn't hire a bus to
run over him before then <wink>).</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 26 Aug 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q87'>After writing CGI scripts the
traditional way for a few years, it is taking awhile to reshape my
thinking. No sledgehammer to the head yet, but lots of small
sculpting hammers...</p>
<p class='source'>John Eikenberry on the Bobo list, 27 Aug 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q88'>I believe sometimes numbers creep
into my programs as strings, so '4'/2 needs to also be 2. Other
languages do this. Since this is due in part to user input, I guess
'four'/2, 'quattro/2', 'iv/2' etc. need to be 2 as well; don't know
any other language that does so, but Python could take the lead
here in software reliability. Any white space should be ignored,
including between my ears. I don't have time to write any useful
software, so I've decided to devote myself to proposing various
changes to the Python interpreter.</p>
<p class='source'>Donn Cave uses sarcasm with devastating effect,
28 Aug 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q89'>
then-again-if-history-were-important-god-wouldn't-have-hid-
it-in-the- past-ly y'rs</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 28 Aug 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q90'>
> >( float ( / 1 3 ))
> 0.33333333333333331
Now <em>that</em> one is impressive: it's the best possible
17-digit decimal representation of the best possible 53-bit fp
binary representation of 1/3, and 17 is the minimum number of
decimal digits you need in general so that a 53-bit binary fp value
can be exactly reconstructed by a best-possible atof.
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 2 Sep 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q91'>This is not a technical issue so much
as a human issue; we are limited and so is our time. (Is this a bug
or a feature of time? Careful; trick question!)</p>
<p class='source'>Fred Drake on the Documentation SIG, 9 Sep
1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q92'>There are also some surprises [in the
late Miocene Australia] some small mammals totally unknown and not
obviously related to any known marsupial (appropriately awarded
names such as <i>Thingodonta</i> and <i>Weirdodonta</i>) and a
giant python immortalized as <i>Montypythonoides</i>.</p>
<p class='source'><cite>The Book of Life</cite>, found by Aaron
Watters</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q93'>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".</p>
<p class='source'>An unknown poster and Fredrik Lundh, 11 Sep
1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q94'>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.</p>
<p class='source'>Aaron Watters, 17 Sep 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q95'>... 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)
...</p>
<p class='source'>Aaron Watters, 17 Sep 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q96'>Every clarity vanished? :-)</p>
<p class='source'>Christian Tismer, after answering a poster's
question, 17 Sep 1998</p>
<p class='quotation' id='q97'>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</p>
<p class='source'>Tim Peters, 24 Sep 1998</p>
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