python-quotes.xml

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<quotations
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  <title>Python Quotations</title>
  <editor>A.M. Kuchling</editor>
  <description>Quotations from the Python community</description>
  <quotation id="q1">
    <p>
      We will perhaps eventually be writing only small modules which
are identified by name as they are used to build larger ones, so that
devices like indentation, rather than delimiters, might become
feasible for expressing local structure in the source language.
    </p>
      <source>Donald E. Knuth, "Structured Programming with goto Statements", Computing Surveys, Vol 6 No 4, Dec. 1974</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q315">
    <p>
      Python's syntax succeeds in combining the mistakes of Lisp and
Fortran. I do not construe that as progress.
    </p>
      <source>Larry Wall, May 12 2004</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q2">
    <p>
      Some rejected alternate names for "Monty Python's Flying
Circus":
    </p>
    <p>
      1 2 3 / It's Them! / Arthur Megapode's Flying Circus / The
Horrible Earnest Megapode / The Panic Show / The Plastic Mac Show /
Ow! It's Colin Plint! / Vaseline Review / Vaseline Parade / The Keen
Show / Brian's Flying Circus / The Year of the Stoat / Cynthia
Fellatio's Flying Circus / Owl Stretching Time / The Whizzo Easishow!
(Guaranteed to last 1/2 hour! Money back if not!)
    </p>
      <source>From Kim "Howard" Johnson's <cite>Life Before and After Monty Python</cite>. It's interesting to contemplate what Python would have been called if one of these names had been chosen.</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q3">
    <p>
      Anybody else on the list got an opinion? Should I change the
language or not?
    </p>
      <source>Guido van Rossum, 28 Dec 1991</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q4">
    <p>
      in-any-case-the-best-christmas-present-i-got-today!-ly y'rs -
tim
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 29 Dec 1991 [First occurrence of Tim Peters's long-phrase-ly idiom.]</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q5">
    <p>
      but-i'm-not-even-motivated-enough-to-finish-this-sig-
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 20 Dec 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q6">
    <p>
      Ha -- you have done me the favor of underestimating my ignorance
&lt;smile&gt;.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 30 Dec 1991</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q7">
    <p>
      I prefer (all things being equal) regularity/orthogonality and
logical syntax/semantics in a language because there is less to have
to remember. (Of course I <em>know</em> all things are NEVER really
equal!)
    </p>
      <source>Guido van Rossum, 6 Dec 1991</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q8">
    <p>
      The details of that silly code are irrelevant.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 4 Mar 1992</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q9">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Guido van Rossum, 7 Jul 1992</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q10">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Jack Jansen, 8 Jul 1992</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q11">
    <p>
      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...
    </p>
      <source>Guido van Rossum, 19 Nov 1992 [First mention of the Web on python-list.]</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q12">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Allan Bailey, 2 Aug 1993 [First mention of Linux on python-list.]</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q13">
    <p>
      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)."
    </p>
      <source>Steven D. Majewski, 9 Sep 1993</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q14">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Steven D. Majewski, 14 Sep 1993</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q15">
    <p>
      "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 &lt;wink&gt;.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 16 Sep 1993</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q16">
    <p>
      I've seen Python criticized as "ugly" precisely because it
<em>doesn't</em> have a trick-based view of the world. In many ways,
it's a dull language, borrowing solid old concepts from many other
languages &amp; styles: boring syntax, unsurprising semantics, few
automatic coercions, etc etc. But that's one of the things I like
about it.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 16 Sep 1993</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q17">
    <p>
      One of the things that makes it interesting, is exactly how much
Guido has managed to exploit that <em>one</em> implementation trick of
'namespaces'.
    </p>
      <source>Steven D. Majewski, 17 Sep 1993</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q18">
    <p>
      Anyone familiar with Modula-3 should appreciate the difference
between a layered approach, with generic Rd/Wr types, and the Python
'C with foam padding' approach.
    </p>
      <source>John Redford, 24 Nov 1993</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q19">
    <p>
      People simply will not agree on what should and shouldn't be "an
error", and once exception-handling mechanisms are introduced to give
people a choice, they will far less agree on what to do with them.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 17 Dec 1993</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q20">
    <p>
      Note that because of its semantics, 'del' <em>can't</em> 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 :-).
    </p>
      <source>Guido van Rossum, 1 Aug 1994</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q21">
    <p>
      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).
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      The only problem with the metaphor is that the process isn't
random at all. Python <em>chooses</em> to include Tk's genes; Linux
decides to make itself more suitable for symbiosis with X, etcetera.
    </p>
    <p>
      Free software is artificial life, but better.
    </p>
      <source>Aaron Watters, 29 Sep 1994</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q22">
    <p>
      I claim complete innocence and ignorance! It must have been Tim.
I wouldn't know a Trondheim Hammer if it fell on my foot!
    </p>
      <source>Steve Majewski, 10 Jan 1995</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q23">
    <p>
      (Aieee! Yet another thing on my TODO pile!)
    </p>
      <source>A.M. Kuchling, 10 Jan 1995</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q24">
    <p>
      [After someone wrote "...assignment capability, a la djikstra"]
Ehh, the poor old man's name is Dijkstra. I should know, "ij" is a
well known digraph in the Dutch language. And before someone asks the
obvious: his famous "P and V" names for semaphores are derived for the
Dutch words "Passeer" and "Verlaat", or "Pass" and "Leave". And no, I
haven't met him (although he did work at CWI back in the fifties when
it was called, as it should still be today, Mathematical Centre). he
currently lives in Austin, Texas I believe. (While we're at it... does
anybody remember the Dijkstra font for Macintoshes? It was a scanned
version of his handwriting. I believe Luca Cardelli scanned it -- the
author of Obliq, a somewhat Python-like distributed language built on
Modula-3. I could go on forever... :-)
    </p>
      <source>Guido van Rossum, 19 Jan 1995</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q25">
    <p>
      As always, I'll leave it to a volunteer to experiment with this.
    </p>
      <source>Guido van Rossum, 20 Jan 1995</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q26">
    <p>
      Non-masochists, please delete this article NOW.
    </p>
      <source>Aaron Watters, 20 Jan 1995</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q27">
    <p>
      If Perl weren't around, I'd probably be using Python right now.
    </p>
      <source>Tom Christiansen in comp.lang.perl, 2 Jun 1995</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q28">
    <p>
      GUI stuff is <em>supposed</em> to be hard. It builds character.
    </p>
      <source>Jim Ahlstrom, at one of the early Python workshops</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q29">
    <p>
      &gt;VERY cool mod, Peter. I'll be curious to see GvR's reaction
to your syntax.
    </p>
    <p>
      Hm.
    </p>
      <source>Nick Seidenman and Guido van Rossum, 1 Aug 1996</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q30">
    <p>
      Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need.
Too much freedom and nobody can read another's code; too little and
expressiveness is endangered.
    </p>
      <source>Guido van Rossum, 13 Aug 1996</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q31">
    <p>
      [On regression testing] Another approach is to renounce all
worldly goods and retreat to a primitive cabin in Montana, where you
can live a life of purity, unpolluted by technological change. But now
and then you can send out little packages....
    </p>
      <source>Aaron Watters</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q32">
    <p>
      Ah, you're a recent victim of forceful evangelization. Write
your own assert module, use it, and come back in a few months to tell
me whether it really caught 90% of your bugs.
    </p>
      <source>Guido van Rossum, 7 Feb 1997</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q33">
    <p>
      The larger scientific computing centers generally have a
"theory" division and a "actually uses the computer" &lt;wink&gt;
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), &amp; 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 &lt;wink&gt;).
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 25 Mar 1997</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q34">
    <p>
      In one particular way the conflict is fundamental &amp; eternal:
the "working scientists" generally understand the hardware du jour
perfectly, and passionately resent any attempt to prevent them from
fiddling with it directly -- while the theory folks are forever
inventing new ways to hide the hardware du jour. That two groups can
both be so right and so wrong at the same time is my seventh proof for
the existence of God ...
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 25 Mar 1997</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q35">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Andrew Mullhaupt, 26 Jun 1997</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q36">
    <p>
      ...although Python uses an obsolete approach to memory
management, it is a <em>good</em> 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.
    </p>
      <source>Andrew Mullhaupt, 26 Jun 1997</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q37">
    <p>
      I suggested holding a "Python Object Oriented Programming
Seminar", but the acronym was unpopular.
    </p>
      <source>Joseph Strout, 28 Feb 1997</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q38">
    <p>
      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.)
    </p>
      <source>Jeremy Hylton, 29 Apr 1997</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q39">
    <p>
      A little girl goes into a pet show and asks for a wabbit. The
shop keeper looks down at her, smiles and says:
    </p>
    <p>
      "Would you like a lovely fluffy little white rabbit, or a cutesy
wootesly little brown rabbit?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "Actually", says the little girl, "I don't think my python would
notice."
    </p>
      <source>Told by Nick Leaton, 4 Dec 1996</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q40">
    <p>
      When I originally designed Perl 5's OO, I thought about a lot of
this stuff, and chose the explicit object model of Python as being the
least confusing. So far I haven't seen a good reason to change my mind
on that.
    </p>
      <source>Larry Wall, 27 Feb 1997 on perl5-porters</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q41">
    <p>

<pre>
</pre>

    </p>
    <p>
      Notes:
    </p>
    <p>
      (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!)
    </p>
    <p>
      (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.
    </p>
    <p>
      (3) Pre-Release vacations are spent in the Catskills.
Post-Release vacations are spent in the Bahamas. Guido is currently
working on a system which will allow him to make more releases of
Python; thus octupling the number of vacations he takes in a year.
    </p>
      <source>Matthew Lewis Carroll Smith, 4 Apr 1997</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q42">
    <p>
      I mean, just take a look at Joe Strout's brilliant little
"python for beginners" page. Replace all print-statements with
<code>sys.stdout.write( string.join(map(str, args)) + "\n")</code> and
you surely won't get any new beginners. And That Would Be A Very Bad
Thing.
    </p>
      <source>Fredrik Lundh, 27 Aug 1996</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q43">
    <p>
      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 <em>still</em>
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.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 30 Apr 1997</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q44">
    <p>
      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 &lt;wink&gt;.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 21 June 1997.</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q45">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Mike Meyer, 6 Nov 1997</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q46">
    <p>
      Indeed, as Palin has come to understand, being part of Python
means never really knowing what may lurk around the corner.
    </p>
    <p>
      "We've never really followed any rules at all with Python," he
said. "We're a spontaneous lot. It's more fun that way."
    </p>
      <source>Michael Palin, quoted from a Reuters/Variety news item titled "Rare Python Reunion", Jan 15 1998.</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q47">
    <p>
      Python is an excellent language for learning object orientation.
(It also happens to be my favorite OO scripting language.)
    </p>
      <author>Sriram Srinivasan</author>
      <source><cite>Advanced Perl Programming</cite></source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q48">
    <p>
      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 &lt;wink&gt;.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 12 Feb 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q49">
    <p>
      Ah! "Never mind" to a bunch of what I said before (this editor
can't move backwards &lt;wink&gt;).
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 12 Feb 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q50">
    <p>
      After 1.5 years of Python, I'm still discovering richness (and
still unable to understand what the hell Jim Fulton is talking about).
    </p>
      <source>Gordon McMillan, 13 Mar 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q51">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>John J. Lehmann, 19 Mar 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q52">
    <p>
      ... 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.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 22 Mar 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q53">
    <p>
      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
&lt;0.9 wink&gt;.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 30 Mar 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q54">
    <p>
      Python is a little weak in forcing encapsulation. It isn't made
for bondage and domination environments.
    </p>
      <source>Paul Prescod, 30 Mar 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q55">
    <p>
      One of my first big programming assignments as a student of
computer science was a source formatter for Pascal. The assignment was
designed to show us the real-life difficulties of group programming
projects. It succeeded perhaps too well. For a long time, I was
convinced that source code formatters were a total waste of time, and
decided to write beautiful code that no automatic formatter could
improve upon. In fact, I would intentionally write code that
formatters could only make worse.
    </p>
      <source>Guido van Rossum, 31 Mar 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q56">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Berners-Lee, at the WWW7 conference</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q57">
    <p>
      From gotos to the evolution of life in 10 posts; that's
comp.lang.python for you!
    </p>
      <source>A.M. Kuchling, 4 Apr 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q58">
    <p>
      This is <em>Python</em>! 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 <em>semantics</em> way
back when Guido was just a wee snakelet frolicking in the lush
Amsterdam jungle.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 24 Apr 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q59">
    <p>
      The infinities aren't contagious except in that they often
appear that way due to their large size.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters on the IEEE 754 floating point standard, 27 Apr 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q60">
    <p>
      The "of course, while <em>I</em> 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? <em>Objecting</em> 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 <em>nobody</em> ever does, in which case those
"less nimble colleagues and students" must be supernaturally feeble to
merit such concern.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 29 Apr 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q61">
    <p>
      "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."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Like clothes.launder() vs money.launder(), or shape.draw() vs
blood.draw(), or matrix.norm() vs hi.norm() &lt;wink&gt;? I'm afraid
English thrives on puns, and the same word routinely means radically
different things across application areas. Therefore, to insist that a
word have "one true meaning" in a programming language is insisting
that the language cater to one true application domain."
    </p>
      <source>Jim Fulton and Tim Peters, in a discussion of rich comparisons, 29 Apr 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q62">
    <p>
      Indeed, when I design <em>my</em> killer language, the
identifiers "foo" and "bar" will be reserved words, never used, and
not even mentioned in the reference manual. Any program using one will
simply dump core without comment. Multitudes will rejoice.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 29 Apr 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q63">
    <p>
      Too little freedom makes life confusingly clumsy; too much,
clumsily confusing. Luckily, the tension between freedom and restraint
eventually gets severed by Guido's Razor.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 29 Apr 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q64">
    <p>
      In other words, I'm willing to see dark corners added to the
language, as long as I don't have to go into them myself.
    </p>
      <source>A.M. Kuchling, 29 Apr 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q65">
    <p>
      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?
    </p>
      <source>Jeremy Hylton, in a discussion of rich comparisons, 29 Apr 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q66">
    <p>
      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>
      <source>Tim Peters, 1 May 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q67">
    <p>
      Well, they will be: "&lt;" 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>
      <source>Tim Peters, 6 May 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q68">
    <p>
      You write a great program, regardless of language, by redoing it
over &amp; over &amp; over &amp; 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&lt;wink&gt;.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 5 Jun 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q69">
    <p>
      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 &lt;0.5 wink&gt;. 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>
      <source>Tim Peters, 5 Jun 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q70">
    <p>
      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>
      <source>Gordon McMillan, 8 Jun 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q71">
    <p>
      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>
      <source>Tim Peters, 11 Jun 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q72">
    <p>
      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>
      <source>Guido van Rossum, <cite>Metaclass Programming in Python 1.5</cite></source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q73">
    <p>
      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>
      <source>Tim Peters, on python-help, 16 Jun 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q74">
    <p>
      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>
      <source>Tim Peters, 16 Jun 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q75">
    <p>
      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>
      <source>John Holmgren, 18 Jun 1998</source>
    <note>
      <p>
        Jesuits weren't medieval, the order having been founded in
1540, but it's still a good quotation.
      </p>
    </note>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q76">
    <p>
      &gt; In general, the situation sucks.
    </p>
    <p>
      mind-if-i-use-that-as-my-epitaph&lt;wink&gt;?-ly y'rs - tim
    </p>
      <source>Timothy J. Grant and Tim Peters, 22 Jun 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q77">
    <p>
      &gt; Just for the record, on AIX, the following C program:
    </p>
    <p>
      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" &lt;0.9 wink&gt;.
    </p>
      <source>Vladimir Marangozov and Tim Peters, 23 Jun 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q78">
    <p>
      Python - why settle for snake oil when you can have the
<em>whole</em> snake?
    </p>
      <source>Mark Jackson, 26 Jun 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q79">
    <p>
      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 &amp; 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>
      <source>Tim Peters, 10 Jul 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q80">
    <p>
      "Since I'm so close to the pickle module, I just look at the
pickles directly, as I'm pretty good at reading pickles."
    </p>
    <p>
      "As you all can imagine, this trick goes over really well at
parties."
    </p>
      <source>Jim Fulton and Paul Everitt on the Bobo list, 17 Jul 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q81">
    <p>
      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>
      <source>Steven D. Majewski, 23 Jul 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q82">
    <p>
      In general, Our Guido flees from schemes that merely change
<em>which</em> foot gets blown off &lt;0.45 caliber wink&gt;. Schemes
that remove the firing pin entirely have a much better, um, shot
&lt;wink&gt;.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 25 Jul 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q83">
    <p>
      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 &lt;wink&gt;.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 25 Jul 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q84">
    <p>
      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>
      <source>Gordon McMillan, 30 Jul 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q85">
    <p>
      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>
      <source>Tim Peters, 6 Aug 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q86">
    <p>
      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
&lt;wink&gt;).
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 26 Aug 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q87">
    <p>
      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>
      <source>John Eikenberry on the Bobo list, 27 Aug 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q88">
    <p>
      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>
      <source>Donn Cave uses sarcasm with devastating effect, 28 Aug 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q89">
    <p>
      then-again-if-history-were-important-god-wouldn't-have-hid-
it-in-the- past-ly y'rs
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 28 Aug 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q90">
    <p>

<pre>
</pre>
       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>
      <source>Tim Peters, 2 Sep 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q91">
    <p>
      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>
      <source>Fred Drake on the Documentation SIG, 9 Sep 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q92">
    <p>
      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
<foreign>Thingodonta</foreign> and <foreign>Weirdodonta</foreign>) and
a giant python immortalized as <foreign>Montypythonoides</foreign>.
    </p>
      <source><cite>The Book of Life</cite>, found by Aaron Watters</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q93">
    <p>
      Can the denizens of this group enlighten me about what the
advantages of Python are, versus Perl ?
    </p>
    <p>
      "python" is more likely to pass unharmed through your spelling
checker than "perl".
    </p>
      <source>An unknown poster and Fredrik Lundh, 11 Sep 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q94">
    <p>
      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>
      <source>Aaron Watters, 17 Sep 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q95">
    <p>
      ... 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>
      <source>Aaron Watters, 17 Sep 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q96">
    <p>
      Every clarity vanished? :-)
    </p>
      <source>Christian Tismer after answering a poster's question, 17 Sep 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q97">
    <p>
      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 &lt;wink&gt;.
    </p>
    <p>
      not-to-mention-the-girls-ly y'rs
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 24 Sep 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q98">
    <p>
      &lt;shakes head ruefully&gt; 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. &lt;shakes head ruefully again&gt;
    </p>
      <source>A.M. Kuchling, 1 Oct 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q99">
    <p>
      E.g., at the REBOL prompt I typed
<pre>
</pre>
       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.
    </p>
    <p>
      now-<em>that's</em>-user-friendly&lt;wink&gt;-ly y'rs
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 24 Sep 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q100">
    <p>
      I've reinvented the idea of variables and types as in a
programming language, something I do on every project.
    </p>
      <source>Greg Ward, September 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q101">
    <p>
      "The event/tree dualism reminds me why I always wanted to be
able to do pattern matching on trees."
    </p>
    <p>
      "'Honey, what is this guy doing up there?' 'Oh, I suppose it's
Christian, trying to match some patterns.' "
    </p>
      <source>Christian Tismer and Dirk Heise, 12 Oct 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q102">
    <p>
      Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.
    </p>
      <source>Larry Wall, 14 Oct 1998</source>
    <note>
      <p>
        In a post to the perl-users mailing list (archived version at
http://faqchest.dynhost.com/prgm/perlu-l/perl-98/perl-9810/perl-
981002/perl98101602_19460.html)
      </p>
    </note>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q103">
    <p>
      "What's the opinion of the (wink) Python luminaries?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "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.
    </p>
    <p>
      they-never-like-<em>any</em>-of-my-ideas-ly y'rs"
    </p>
      <source>Stuart Hungerford and Tim Peters, 14 Oct 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q104">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Paul Prescod, 18 Oct 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q105">
    <p>
      It won't work. This is far too concrete a problem to interest
Tim. I see 3 possible approaches:
    </p>
    <p>
      1) Claim that Python can't do a &lt;some random combination of
'L', 'R', 'A'&gt; 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.
    </p>
    <p>
      2) Turn it into an optimization problem and get a solution from
Marc- Andre using mxTextTools next week.
    </p>
    <p>
      3) Turn it into an obfuscation problem and get competing
solutions from Greg Stein and Fredrik tomorrow morning.
    </p>
    <p>
      if-anybody's-found-don-beaudry's-sucker-button-let-me-know ly
'yrs
    </p>
      <source>Gordon McMillan, 16 Oct 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q106">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Gordon McMillan, 19 Oct 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q107">
    <p>
      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 &lt;wink&gt;.
    </p>
    <p>
      well-<em>that</em>-one-went-easy-ly y'rs - tim
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 20 Oct 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q108">
    <p>
      We did requirements and task analysis, iterative design, and
user testing. You'd almost think programming languages were an
interface between people and computers.
    </p>
      <source>Steven Pemberton, one of the designers of Python's direct ancestor ABC</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q109">
    <p>
      Not at all, although I agree here too &lt;wink&gt;. 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.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 31 Oct 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q110">
    <p>
      My customers consider it a marketable skill that I a) think for
myself b) share my thoughts with them.
    </p>
      <source>Paul Prescod, 2 Nov 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q111">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      Maybe it gets us a little closer to art.
    </p>
      <source>Ivan Van Laningham, 3 Nov 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q112">
    <p>
      You might think "That's illegal." That's not illegal; that's
<em>cool</em>.
    </p>
      <source>Paul Dubois at IPC7, on recursive template definitions in C++</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q113">
    <p>
      This supports reflection, which is the 90s way of writing self-
modifying code.
    </p>
      <source>John Aycock at IPC7, during his parsing talk</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q114">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Jim Hugunin at IPC7, on embedding BNF parsing rules in docstrings</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q115">
    <p>
      "The Mayans looked on the integers as gods."
    </p>
    <p>
      "What did the Mayans think of integer division?"
    </p>
      <source>Ivan Van Laningham and an unknown audience member at IPC7</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q116">
    <p>
      Y2K problem? The Mayans didn't have a <em>millennium</em>-2K
problem!
    </p>
      <source>Eric S. Raymond at IPC7, on learning that the Mayan calendar takes 28 octillion years to wrap around</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q117">
    <p>
      "Generic identifier" -- think about it too much and your head
explodes.
    </p>
      <source>Sean McGrath at IPC7, discussing SGML terminology</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q118">
    <p>
      Nothing I've ever written has reached 1.0.
    </p>
      <source>Greg Ward at IPC7, on using small version numbers</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q119">
    <p>
      Well, that's a little thing -- the specification.
    </p>
      <source>Guido van Rossum at IPC7</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q120">
    <p>
      "We've got a name (Module Distribution Utilities) that gives us
a good 3-letter acronym to group things under: MDU."
    </p>
    <p>
      "&lt;thpftbt&gt;"
    </p>
      <source>Greg Ward and Jeremy Hylton at IPC7</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q121">
    <p>
      Mailman is designed to be extensible <em>and</em>
comprehensible. Without comprehensibility, enhancement is
self-limiting -- functionality may be improved, but further
enhancement gets increasingly difficult.
    </p>
      <source>Ken Manheimer at IPC7</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q122">
    <p>
      "Generating Usable Installations" -- OK, you've got the GUI SIG.
    </p>
      <source>Barry Warsaw at IPC7, on the choice of name for a SIG to discuss extension building</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q123">
    <p>
      Performance is a lot like drugs -- it doesn't do much for you,
but it occupies a lot of your time.
    </p>
      <source>Jeremy Hylton at IPC7, on the need for a Performance SIG</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q124">
    <p>
      I made some slides, but they suck, so I won't bother with them.
    </p>
      <source>Andrew Kuchling at IPC7</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q125">
    <p>
      "What's Python?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "It's a computer programming language."
    </p>
    <p>
      "You mean, like DOS?"
    </p>
      <source>Some guy in a bar and Eric S. Raymond (who was wearing a conference T-shirt) at IPC7</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q126">
    <p>
      Excellent plan! Devious minds are attracted to Python, like
mimes to unappreciative crowds.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 13 Nov 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q127">
    <p>
      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*!
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 13 Nov 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q128">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Gordon McMillan, 18 Nov 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q129">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      Let research languages innovate. Python integrates.
    </p>
      <source>Paul Prescod, 21 Nov 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q130">
    <p>
      "I got a little mad at the way python polynomials were written
-- the code looked like its author knew neither polynomials nor
Python."
    </p>
    <p>
      "That would be me :-)."
    </p>
      <source>Moshe Zadka and Guido van Rossum, 22 Nov 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q131">
    <p>
      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.)
    </p>
      <source>Guido van Rossum, 25 Nov 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q132">
    <p>
      "My course members are almost all coming from Math, and the
first question was 'why isn't it complete?' Just a matter of
elegance."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Oh, don't worry. My background is math. This is actually good
for them -- like discovering that Santa Claus doesn't really exist."
    </p>
      <source>Christian Tismer and Guido van Rossum, 2 Dec 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q133">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Cameron Laird, 2 Dec 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q134">
    <p>
      PYTHON = (P)rogrammers (Y)earning (T)o (H)omestead (O)ur
(N)oosphere.
    </p>
      <source>Seen in Sean McGrath's .sig, 3 Dec 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q135">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 3 Dec 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q136">
    <p>
      "Python? Oh, I've heard of that. I have a friend at the NSA who
uses it."
    </p>
      <source>Overhead at a meeting, quoted in c.l.p on 3 Dec 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q137">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters in the third person, 3 Dec 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q138">
    <p>
      "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...
    </p>
      <source>From the <cite>Washington Post</cite>, 3 Dec 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q139">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Gordon McMillan, 3 Dec 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q140">
    <p>
      Hey, while they're all eating dinner, let's sneak in a keyword!
    </p>
    <p>
      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...
    </p>
      <source>Mike Fletcher, 25 Dec 1998</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q141">
    <p>
      "Can we kill this thread? The only thing it does as far as I'm
concerned is increase the posting statistics. :-)"
    </p>
    <p>
      "don't-open-cans-of-worms-unless-you're-looking-for-a-new-diet-l
y y'rs"
    </p>
      <source>Guido van Rossum and Tim Peters, 6 Jan 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q142">
    <p>
      Hey, that was the first truly portable laptop! Of course I'm
nostalgic. Came with a mighty 24Kb RAM standard, &amp; 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
&lt;wink&gt;.
    </p>
    <p>
      m100-basic-reminded-me-a-lot-of-python-except-that-it-sucked-ly
y'rs
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters remembering the Model 100, 10 Jan 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q143">
    <p>
      "Heh -- all it really broke so far was my resistance to
installing Tk. I suppose wizardry is inevitable after one installs
something, though &lt;wink&gt;."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Spoken like a truly obsessive-compulsive wizard!
It-takes-one-to-know -one..."
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters and Guido van Rossum, 6 Jan 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q144">
    <p>
      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
(&lt;xsl:eval&gt;...&lt;/&gt;) would completely destroy those
features. Architectural mapping would, in general, be as reliable and
high performance as ordinary software -- (not at all).
    </p>
      <source>Paul Prescod, 6 Jan 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q145">
    <p>
      Darned confusing, unless you have that magic ingredient
<em>coffee</em>, of which I can pay you Tuesday for a couple pounds of
extra-special grind today.
    </p>
      <source>John Mitchell, 11 Jan 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q146">
    <p>
      That's so obvious that someone has already got a patent on it.
    </p>
      <source>Guido van Rossum, 12 Jan 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q147">
    <p>
      I have to stop now. I've already told you more than I know.
    </p>
      <source>Wolf Logan, 14 Jan 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q148">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Ken Manheimer, 24 Jan 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q149">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      We could judge a standard's success by its ability to reveal
another level of standardization that is necessary.
    </p>
      <source>Paul Prescod, 24 Jan 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q150">
    <p>
      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!
    </p>
      <source>Steven D. Majewski, 25 Jan 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q151">
    <p>
      Constraints often boost creativity.
    </p>
      <source>Jim Hugunin, 11 Feb 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q152">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Andrew Cooke, 12 Feb 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q153">
    <p>
      any-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-is-too-mysterious-
to- trust-ly y'rs
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 16 Feb 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q154">
    <p>
      "I don't think we've thought of this, and it's actually a good
idea."
    </p>
    <p>
      "I'd better go patent it!"
    </p>
      <source>Uche Ogbuji and Paul Prescod, 16 Feb 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q155">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 17 Feb 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q156">
    <p>
      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 &lt;wink&gt;).
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 21 Feb 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q157">
    <p>
      Yes: the code in ntpath.split is too clever to have any hope of
working correctly &lt;wink&gt;.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 19 Mar 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q158">
    <p>
      Thanks. The sooner I get discouraged and quit, the more time
I'll save overall.
    </p>
      <source>Frank Sergeant, 28 Mar 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q159">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Richard van de Stadt, 9 Apr 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q160">
    <p>
      Might just be nostalgia, but I think I would give an arm or two
to get that (not necessarily my own, though).
    </p>
      <source>Fredrik Lundh, 13 May 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q161">
    <p>
      1. Beautiful is better than ugly.
    </p>
    <p>
      2. Explicit is better than implicit.
    </p>
    <p>
      3. Simple is better than complex.
    </p>
    <p>
      4. Complex is better than complicated.
    </p>
    <p>
      5. Flat is better than nested.
    </p>
    <p>
      6. Sparse is better than dense.
    </p>
    <p>
      7. Readability counts.
    </p>
    <p>
      8. Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
    </p>
    <p>
      9. Although practicality beats purity.
    </p>
    <p>
      10. Errors should never pass silently.
    </p>
    <p>
      11. Unless explicitly silenced.
    </p>
    <p>
      12. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
    </p>
    <p>
      13. There should be one -- and preferably only one -- obvious
way to do it.
    </p>
    <p>
      14. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're
Dutch.
    </p>
    <p>
      15. Now is better than never.
    </p>
    <p>
      16. Although never is often better than <em>right</em> now.
    </p>
    <p>
      17. If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
    </p>
    <p>
      18. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good
idea.
    </p>
    <p>
      19. Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of
those!
    </p>
    <p>

    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters' 19 Pythonic Theses, 4 Jun 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q162">
    <p>
      "However, I've heard that after about 10K items in a dict, it
starts having problems."
    </p>
    <p>
      "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."
    </p>
      <source>Aahz Maruch and Tim Peters, 8 Jun 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q163">
    <p>
      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".
    </p>
      <source>From Linux Weekly News, 17 Jul 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q164">
    <p>
      ... we need more people like him, who are willing to explore
without being driven to argue with people about it.
    </p>
      <source>William Tanksley on Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, 2 Jul 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q165">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Paul Everitt on the term "pluggable brains", 5 Jul 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q166">
    <p>
      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).
    </p>
      <source>Jim Fulton on the term "pluggable brains", 5 Jul 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q167">
    <p>
      This is good. It means that while Ionesco is dead, his spirit
lives on.
    </p>
      <source>Gordon McMillan on how Windows attaches meaning to 3-character file extensions, 30 Jul 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q168">
    <p>
      (On the statement <code>print "42 monkeys"+"1 snake"</code>)
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".
    </p>
      <source>Jim Fulton, 10 Aug 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q169">
    <p>
      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
&lt;wink&gt;.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters on SNOBOL4, 17 Aug 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q170">
    <p>
      Theory and reality rarely are kissing cousins.
    </p>
      <source>Christopher Petrilli, 1 Sep 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q171">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 3 Sep 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q172">
    <p>
      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...
    </p>
      <source>Sean McGrath, 4 Sep 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q173">
    <p>
      On a scale of one to ten I'd give it a tim.
    </p>
      <source>William Tanksley, 13 Sep 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q174">
    <p>
      Statistical analysis shows that the junk looks like human text,
which clearly shows that it is actually used in some yet unknown way.
(docstrings?)
    </p>
      <source>Fredrik Lundh, writing about junk DNA, 5 Oct 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q175">
    <p>
      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 &lt;0.5
wink&gt;.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 11 Nov 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q176">
    <p>
      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...
    </p>
      <source>Michael Hudson, 16 Nov 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q177">
    <p>
      The bottom tier is what a certain class of wanker would call
"business objects"...
    </p>
      <source>Greg Ward, 9 Dec 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q178">
    <p>
      Since I've done fewer than my normal quota of futile things this
week, I thought I'd post to remind people that ...
    </p>
      <source>Phil Austin, 9 Dec 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q179">
    <p>
      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".
    </p>
      <source>Gordon McMillan, 15 Dec 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q180">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Gordon McMillan, 15 Dec 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q181">
    <p>
      When Jim [Fulton] says "tricky" it means your brain could
explode.
    </p>
      <source>Michel Pelletier, 15 Dec 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q182">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Sean McGrath, 19 Dec 1999</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q183">
    <p>
      Abstraction is one of those notions that Python tosses out the
window, yet expresses very well.
    </p>
      <source>Gordon McMillan, 6 Jan 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q184">
    <p>
      The set of naming conventions has a cardinality equal to the
number of Python users.
    </p>
      <source>Gordon McMillan, 6 Jan 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q185">
    <p>
      The way to build large Python applications is to componentize
and loosely-couple the hell out of everything.
    </p>
      <source>Aahz Maruch, 6 Jan 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q186">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Guido van Rossum, 20 Jan 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q187">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Manuel Gutierrez Algaba, 26 Jan 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q188">
    <p>
      Life's better without braces.
    </p>
      <source>Unofficial motto of IPC8, coined by Bruce Eckel</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q189">
    <p>
      "Aggressive" means "sometimes wrong".
    </p>
      <source>John Aycock at IPC8, during his "Agressive Type Inferencing" talk</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q190">
    <p>
      Do I do everything in C++ and teach a course in advanced
swearing?
    </p>
      <source>David Beazley at IPC8, on choosing a language for teaching</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q191">
    <p>
      Alice is 3D Logo on steroids.
    </p>
      <source>Randy Pausch at IPC8</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q192">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters after a reference to "Python's cult-like following", 2 Feb 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q193">
    <p>
      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 &lt;0.9 wink&gt;.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 10 Feb 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q194">
    <p>
      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%.
    </p>
      <source>Vladimir Marangozov after Yet Another indentation flamewar, 16 Feb 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q195">
    <p>
      ... 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.
    </p>
      <source>Greg Ward, 15 Feb 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q196">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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
&lt;wink wink&gt;. Then the secret handshake. Then you sniff each
other's armpits and stamp your foot 3 times.
    </p>
    <p>
      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 &lt;wink wink&gt;. 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. &lt;wink wink&gt;
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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Gordon McMillan, 18 Feb 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q197">
    <p>
      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?
    </p>
      <source>Bernhard Herzog, 21 Feb 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q198">
    <p>
      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 <em>not</em> at an extreme!
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters on the knotty problem of finalizers and cycles, 3 Mar 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q199">
    <p>
      It's extremely un-Pythonic to let things leak (despite that it
has let things leak for a decade &lt;wink&gt;), but also extremely
un-Pythonic to make some wild-ass guess.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters on garbage collection, 3 Mar 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q200">
    <p>
      IOW, the only people who lose under this scheme are the ones
begging to lose, and their "loss" consists of taking responsibility.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 3 Mar 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q201">
    <p>
      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
&lt;wink&gt;).
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters on garbage collection, 3 Mar 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q202">
    <p>
      I can see the FAQ now...
    </p>
    <p>
      Q1.1.2.3: Why can't I divide integers?
    </p>
    <p>
      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 <em>ring</em>,
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.
    </p>
      <source>Johann Hibschman, 4 Mar 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q203">
    <p>
      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 &lt;wink&gt;.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 4 Mar 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q204">
    <p>
      The reason I'm right is that I said there won't be any
<em>single</em> "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 <em>and</em> elephants
<em>and</em> fish <em>and</em> seals <em>and</em> birds, because there
will be many diverse "habitats" where the particular adaptations of
each will be needed/advantageous.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Ran, 5 Mar 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q205">
    <p>
      "Complexity" seems to be a lot like "energy": you can
<em>transfer</em> 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.
    </p>
      <source>Ran, 5 Mar 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q206">
    <p>
      LaTeX2HTML is pain.
    </p>
      <source>Fred Drake in a documentation checkin message, 14 Mar 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q207">
    <p>
      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).
    </p>
      <source>William Tanksley, 21 Mar 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q208">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Barry Warsaw, 23 Mar 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q209">
    <p>
      &gt;Have you ever looked at the output of a <code>bib | tbl |
eqn</code> pipeline?
    </p>
    <p>
      Are you kids still using that as a pick-up line?
    </p>
      <source>Roy Smith and Cameron Laird, 4 Apr 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q210">
    <p>
      This is like getting lost in a dictionary. What does quincuncial
mean anyhow?
    </p>
      <source>Dennis Hamilton, 4 Apr 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q211">
    <p>
      UTF-8 has a certain purity in that it equally annoys every
nation, and is nobody's default encoding.
    </p>
      <source>Andy Robinson, 10 Apr 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q212">
    <p>
      "Now if we could figure out where python programmers are from,
someone could write a book and get rich."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Yorkshire."
    </p>
      <source>Quinn Dunkan and Warren Postma, 11 Apr 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q213">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Jeff Bauer, 21 Apr 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q214">
    <p>
      Of course, this brought me face to face once again with Python's
<foreign>pons asinorum</foreign>, the significance of whitespace.
    </p>
      <source>Eric S. Raymond, in the <cite>Linux Journal</cite>'s Python supplement</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q215">
    <p>
      Surprisingly enough, Python has taught me more about Lisp than
Lisp ever did ;-).
    </p>
      <source>Glyph Lefkowitz, 3 May 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q216">
    <p>
      How about we notate the hungarian notation with the type of
hungarian notation, you know, hungarian meta notation: HWND
aWin32ApiHandleDefinedInWindowsDotH_hwndWindowHandle;
    </p>
      <source>Warren Postma, 4 May 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q217">
    <p>
      Note that Python's licence is in fact the MIT X11 licence, with
MIT filed off and CNRI written in its place in crayon.
    </p>
      <source>A.M. Kuchling, 5 May 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q218">
    <p>
      Once you've read and understood <cite>The Art of the Metaobject
Protocol</cite> 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.)
    </p>
      <source>Neel Krishnaswami, 9 May 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q219">
    <p>
      "The future" has arrived but they forgot to update the docs.
    </p>
      <source>R. David Murray, 9 May 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q220">
    <p>
      /* This algorithm is from a book written before the invention of
structured programming... */
    </p>
      <source>Comment in parser/pgen.c, noted by Michael Hudson</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q221">
    <p>
      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]
    </p>
      <source>Aaron Watters, 12 May 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q222">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      I'm sorry, was my bias showing again? :-)
    </p>
      <source>William Tanksley, 13 May 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q223">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Moshe Zadka, 13 May 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q224">
    <p>
      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. ;-)
    </p>
      <source>Grant R. Griffin, 14 May 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q225">
    <p>
      Unicode: everyone wants it, until they get it.
    </p>
      <source>Barry Warsaw, 16 May 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q226">
    <p>
      I saw a hack you sent me a few months ago and approved of its
intent and was saddened by its necessity.
    </p>
      <source>Jim Fulton, 16 May 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q227">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Neel Krishnaswami, 21 May 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q228">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>John W. Baxter, 21 May 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q229">
    <p>
      Python: embodies a harmony of chocolate kisses with hints of
jasmine and rose. Trussardi's wild new fragrance.
    </p>
      <source>From <cite>Marie Claire</cite>, Australian edition, May 2000; noted by Fiona Czuczman</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q230">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>François Pinard, 22 May 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q231">
    <p>
      In fact, I've never seen an argument about which I cared less.
I'm completely case insensitivity insensitive.
    </p>
      <source>William Tanksley, 23 May 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q232">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Arthur Siegel, 23 May 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q233">
    <p>
      Burroughs did something very odd with COBOL at one point (and
no, it wasn't The Naked Lunch).
    </p>
      <source>Will Rose, 27 May 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q234">
    <p>
      Code generators are hacks. Sometimes necessary hacks, but hacks
nevertheless.
    </p>
      <source>Paul Prescod, 7 Jun 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q235">
    <p>
      Very rough; like estimating the productivity of a welder by the
amount of acetylene used.
    </p>
      <source>Paul Svensson, on measuring programmer productivity by lines of code, 19 Jun 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q236">
    <p>
      I vote for backward compatibility for now, and not only because
that will irritate /F the most.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 30 Jun 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q237">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Jeremy Hylton, 6 Jul 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q238">
    <p>
      You and I think too much alike ?!ng. And if that doesn't scare
you now, you should have a talk with Gordon.
    </p>
      <source>Barry Warsaw, 12 Jul 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q239">
    <p>
      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().
    </p>
      <source>Paul Prescod, on the proposed name marry() for a function to combine sequences, 12 Jul 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q240">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Barry Warsaw, 12 Jul 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q241">
    <p>
      Hey, you know, we can work this in. Sailor Moon + Giant Robots +
Tentacle Demons + Python Conference == Bizarre hilarity ensues!
    </p>
      <source>Alexander Williams, 4 Aug 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q242">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Will Ware, 28 Aug 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q243">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Stephen Figgins, 30 Aug 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q244">
    <p>
      INTERVIEWER: Tell us how you came to be drawn into the world of
pragmas.
    </p>
    <p>
      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...
    </p>
      <source>Greg Ewing, 31 Aug 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q245">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Donn Cave, 3 Sep 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q246">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Jeremy Hylton, in the 2.0b1 announcement, 5 Sep 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q247">
    <p>
      Fortunately, you've left that madness behind, and entered the
clean, happy, and safe Python world of transvestite lumberjacks and
singing Vikings.
    </p>
      <source>Quinn Dunkan, 17 Sep 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q248">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Kragen Sitaker, 27 Sep 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q249">
    <p>
      IIRC, he didn't much care for regexps before, but actually
writing a regexp engine drives most people who do it to intense
hatred.
    </p>
    <p>
      Just more of the magic of Python! Transmuting a few peoples'
intense agony into the subject of others' idle amusement &lt;wink&gt;.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 27 Sep 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q250">
    <p>
      "I do not love thee, lambda; let me count the ways..."
    </p>
      <source>Aahz Maruch, 27 Sep 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q251">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>William Kahan, quoted by Tim Peters, 13 Oct 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q252">
    <p>
      "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 ...
    </p>
      <source>William Kahan, quoted by Huaiyu Zhu, 16 Oct 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q253">
    <p>
      The most successful projects I've seen and been on <em>did</em>
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".
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 25 Oct 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q254">
    <p>
      Humour is a tricky thing. Some people can't even get the
spelling right.
    </p>
      <source>Richard Brodie, 30 Oct 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q255">
    <p>
      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)...
    </p>
    <p>
      ....and don't be surprised if you'll find that it's known by
many names, or no name at all!
    </p>
      <source>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*?"</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q256">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Quinn Dunkan, 18 Nov 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q257">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Greg Jorgensen, 26 Nov 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q258">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Christian Tismer, 11 Dec 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q259">
    <p>
      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?
    </p>
      <source>Carel Fellinger, 12 Dec 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q260">
    <p>
      I'm spending most of my waking hours understanding this patch --
it is a true piece of wizardry.
    </p>
      <source>GvR, discussing a patch from Neil Schemenauer, 13 Dec 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q261">
    <p>
      Maybe they took solidity <em>for granted</em>, 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 <em>by far</em> most
software around is imperfect.
    </p>
    <p>
      We <em>must</em> 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!
    </p>
      <source>Alex Martelli, 13 Dec 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q262">
    <p>
      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).
    </p>
      <source>Steve Holden, 13 Dec 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q263">
    <p>
      In keeping with the religious nature of the battle-- and
religion offers precise terms for degrees of damnation! --I suggest:
    </p>
    <p>
      struggling -- a supported feature; the initial state of all
features; may transition to Anathematized
    </p>
    <p>
      anathematized -- this feature is now cursed, but is supported;
may transition to Condemned or Struggling; intimacy with Anathematized
features is perilous
    </p>
    <p>
      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
    </p>
    <p>
      crucified -- a feature that is no longer supported; may
transition to Resurrected
    </p>
    <p>
      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).
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 18 Dec 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q264">
    <p>
      my-python-code-runs-5x-faster-this-month-thanks-to-dumping-$2K-
on-a- new-machine-ly y'rs
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 26 Dec 2000</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q265">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>GvR, 04 Jan 2001, in a comment on patch #101264</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q266">
    <p>
      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 &lt;wink&gt;.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 14 Jan 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q267">
    <p>
      If you're using anything besides US-ASCII, I <em>stringly</em>
suggest Python 2.0.
    </p>
      <source>Uche Ogbuji (A fortuitous typo?), 29 Jan 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q268">
    <p>
      "There goes Tim, browsing the Playboy site just for the
JavaScript. Honest."
    </p>
    <p>
      "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."
    </p>
      <source>Barry Warsaw and Tim Peters, 3 Feb 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q269">
    <p>
      We were sincerely hoping that the Python core team would teach
their employers how to code Python, instead of the other way around...
    </p>
      <source>Pieter Nagel, 5 Feb 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q270">
    <p>
      This bug fix brought to you by the letters b, c, d, g, h, ...
and the reporter Ping.
    </p>
      <source>Jeremy Hylton in a checkin message for Python/compile.c, 12 Feb 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q271">
    <p>
      "It's in ClassModules.py you dumb f**k - can't you tell by the
name?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "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."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Thanks. I'll try to keep that in mind the next time I flame
myself."
    </p>
      <source>Phlip, following up to a query he'd posted earlier, and Thomas Wouters, 18 Feb 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q272">
    <p>
      "Also, does the simple algorithm you used in Cyclops have a
name?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "Not officially, but it answers to "hey, dumb-ass!"
    </p>
      <source>Neil Schemenauer, interested in finding strongly connected components in graphs, and Tim Peters, 23 Feb 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q273">
    <p>
      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.)
    </p>
      <source>GvR, in a CVS commit message, 22 Mar 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q274">
    <p>
      Python: programming the way Guido indented it.
    </p>
      <source>Digital Creations T-shirt slogan at IPC9</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q275">
    <p>
      Stackless Python: programming the way Guido prevented it.
    </p>
      <source>Christian Tismer's title slide, at IPC9</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q276">
    <p>
      I don't think we should use rational numbers for money because
money isn't rational.
    </p>
      <source>Moshe Zadka, at IPC9</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q277">
    <p>
      We can't stop people from complaining but we can influence what
they complain about.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, at IPC9</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q278">
    <p>
      Perl is like vise grips. You can do anything with it but it is
the wrong tool for every job.
    </p>
      <source>Bruce Eckel, at IPC9</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q279">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Greg Wilson, at IPC9</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q280">
    <p>
      here's the eff-bot's favourite lambda refactoring rule:
<pre>
</pre>

    </p>
      <source>Fredrik Lundh, 01 Apr 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q281">
    <p>
      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."
    </p>
      <source>Paul Prescod, 11 Apr 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q282">
    <p>
      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. :)
    </p>
      <source>Jürgen Hermann, 11 Apr 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q283">
    <p>
      As you seem totally unwilling or unable to understand that
<foreign>Weltanschauung</foreign> 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).
    </p>
      <source>Alex Martelli, 17 Apr 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q284">
    <p>
      "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."
    </p>
    <p>
      "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."
    </p>
      <source>Alex Martelli and Greg Ewing, 19 Apr 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q285">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Neelakantan Krishnaswami, 20 Apr 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q286">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Fredrik Lundh, 10 May 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q287">
    <p>
      1495 is a <em>deservedly</em> 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.
    </p>
      <source>Alex Martelli, 24 May 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q288">
    <p>
      "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?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "On Windows, that's called 'a miracle'."
    </p>
      <source>Laura Creighton and Tim Peters, 28 May 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q289">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>David Ascher, 28 May 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q290">
    <p>
      "Oh, read <em>all</em> Kahan has written, and if you emerge
still thinking you <em>know</em> what you're doing when floating point
is involved, you're either Tim Peters, or the world champ of hubris."
    </p>
    <p>
      "I find it's possible to be both &lt;wink&gt;."
    </p>
      <source>Alex Martelli and Tim Peters, 20 May 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q291">
    <p>
      Wow, this almost looks like a real flamefest. ("Flame" being
defined as the presence of metacomments.)
    </p>
      <source>GvR, 13 Jun 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q292">
    <p>
      "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..."
    </p>
    <p>
      "I thought it already has, pretty much."
    </p>
      <source>GvR and A.M. Kuchling, 14 Jun 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q293">
    <p>
      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?
    </p>
      <source>Glyph Lefkowitz, 7 Jun 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q294">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Michael Hudson, 28 Jun 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q295">
    <p>
      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
<em>natural</em> candidate for embracing Design by Contract &lt;0.6
wink&gt;.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 3 Jun 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q296">
    <p>
      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
<em>only</em> 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.
    </p>
    <p>
      This is when both sides start throwing rocks.
    </p>
      <source>Quinn Dunkan, 13 Jul 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q297">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Ken Manheimer, 19 Jul 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q298">
    <p>
      Unicode is the first technology I have to deal with which makes
me hope I die before I really really <em>really</em> need to
understand it fully.
    </p>
      <source>David Ascher, 19 Jul 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q299">
    <p>
      Moore's law is slowly making type declarations irrelevant...
    </p>
      <source>Paul Prescod, 29 Jul 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q300">
    <p>
      The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code
you spent time on when you realize it's pointless.
    </p>
      <source>Bram Cohen, 20 Sep 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q301">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 18 Oct 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q302">
    <p>
      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 ;-).
    </p>
      <source>Paul Rubin, 30 Oct 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q303">
    <p>
      "Which inevitably has the followup rhyme 'There was a young man
from Verdun'."
    </p>
    <p>
      "But somehow no one ever seems to be able to remember what it
was about the man from Abdero."
    </p>
      <source>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."</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q304">
    <p>
      Sometimes I feel like I'm reinventing Zope, but at least it's a
Zope I understand.
    </p>
      <source>Quinn Dunkan, 05 Nov 2001 on the quixote-users list</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q305">
    <p>
      Homological algebra beckons -- brain relief in this context!
    </p>
      <source>Michael Hudson, 07 Nov 2001, in a discussion of Stackless Python</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q306">
    <p>
      If you're talking "useful", I'm not your bot.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 08 Nov 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q307">
    <p>
      "How do you do a range of floats?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "Bring flowers, and buy them all nice dinners. Try not to be
<em>too</em> obvious that you're out to do them, though."
    </p>
      <source>Thomas Wouters and Tim Peters, 09 Nov 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q308">
    <p>
      Changing diapers reminded Guido that he wanted to allow for some
measure of multiple inheritance from a mix of new- and classic-style
classes.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters in a checkin message, 14 Nov 2001</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q309">
    <p>
      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&amp;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."
    </p>
      <source>Skip Montanaro, 4 Jan 2002</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q310">
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <source>Courageous, 19 Jan 2002</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q311" date="2002-03-05">
    <p>
      I'll lend you <cite>Calendrical Calculations</cite>. Even
<em>skimming</em> the chapters on some of the world's other
calendrical delights makes our date gimmicks blind via the intensity
of their clarity.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 05 Mar 2002</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q312" date="2002-03-20">
    <p>
      The joy of coding Python should be in seeing short, concise,
readable classes that express a lot of action in a small amount of
clear code -- not in reams of trivial code that bores the reader to
death.
    </p>
      <source>GvR, 20 Mar 2002</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q313">
    <p>
      A bot may injure a human being, or, preferably, through
inaction, allow a human being to come to harm, although laughing about
either in the hearing of humans is MACNAM-017B3^H.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 26 Mar 2002</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q314">
    <p>
      "It works in Scheme" doesn't give me the warm fuzzy feeling that
it's been tried in real life.
    </p>
      <source>GvR, 02 Oct 2002</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation>
    <p>
      Most recipes are short enough for the attention span of the
average Python programmer.
    </p>
      <author>GvR</author>
      <source rdf:resource="urn:isbn:0596001673">In the introduction to the <cite>Python Cookbook</cite></source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation>
    <p>
      We read Knuth so you don't have to.
    </p>
      <author>Tim Peters</author>
      <source rdf:resource="urn:isbn:0596001673"><cite>Python Cookbook</cite></source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
      <author>Tim Peters</author>
      <source rdf:resource="urn:isbn:0596001673"><cite>Python Cookbook</cite></source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation>
    <p>
      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!"
    </p>
      <author>Alex Martelli</author>
      <source rdf:resource="urn:isbn:0596001673"><cite>Python Cookbook</cite></source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation>
    <p>
      compromise-is-the-art-of-spreading-misery-ly y'rs
    </p>
      <source>Tim Peters, 11 Dec 2002</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation>
    <p>
      As for Grail, it was certainly a "hot product" in the Python
community in 1995 because of the restricted execution environment
which I evaluated for a project involving mobile software agents. How
priorities and trends have changed since then! Who would have thought
that Microsoft Outlook would be the premier platform for mobile code?
    </p>
      <source>Paul Boddie, 16 Jan 2004</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation>
    <p>
      I mean, if I think about my open-source contributions, nobody
wants to see talks with these titles:
    </p>
    <p>
      * The Zope API Reference: Ouch
    </p>
    <p>
      * A Random Handful Of Bugs I've Fixed In Other Peoples' Code
    </p>
    <p>
      * An Old Crufty Project I Inherited That Has Zero Relevance To
You
    </p>
    <p>
      * The Joy of Preemptive Abandonware: Release Late, If Ever (or,
Software Design as a Nihilistic Abstract Art Form) (or, Sourceforge as
a Medium for Cryptic Time Capsules)
    </p>
      <source>Paul Winkler, 14 Mar 2005</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q316" date="2005-06-02">
    <p>
      Syntax should not look like grit on my monitor.
    </p>
      <source>Anthony Baxter, 02 Jun 2005</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q321" date="2006-06-30">
    <p>
      Can this not be resolved by carefully adjusting the order of
finalization? If code can be bootstrapped it can be strootbapped.
    </p>
      <source>Kristján Jónsson, 30 Jun 2006</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q317" date="2006-07-11">
    <p>
      Python resembles Lisp like an octopus eye resembles a mammalian
eye: they have lots in common because they're both pretty good
solutions to similar problems. Deciding whether it's Python or Lisp
that has the retina fitted back-to-front is left as an exercise for
the reader.
    </p>
      <source>Gareth McCaughan, 11 Jul 2006</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q318" date="2006-07-13">
    <p>
      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 on our
computers.
    </p>
      <source>Brett Cannon, 13 Jul 2006</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q319" date="2006-08-29">
    <p>
      ... I've come to believe that some people have the personality
traits that let them tolerate redoing the same work over and over
again for no reason other than management "furniture rearranging",
whereas others start to resent having their (working) life repeatedly
flashed before their eyes, but in slightly different colours, over a
longer period of time.
    </p>
      <source>Paul Boddie, 29 Aug 2006</source>
  </quotation>
  <quotation id="q320" date="2006-08-29">
    <p>
      I am the very model of a modern major database,
      <br />
       For gigabytes of information gathered out in userspace.
      <br />
       For banking applications to a website crackers will deface,
      <br />
       You access me from console or spiffy user interface.
      <br />

    </p>
    <p>
      My multi-threaded architecture offers you concurrency,
      <br />
       And loads of RAM for caching things reduces query latency.
      <br />
       The data is correctly typed, a fact that I will guarantee,
      <br />
       Each datum has a data type, it's specified explicitly.
    </p>
      <source>Tim Chase, 12 Sep 2006</source>
  </quotation>
</quotations>