<shakes head ruefully> You kids today, with your piercings and your big pants and your purple-and-green hair and your X-Files and your Paula Cole and your espresso coffee and your Seattle grunge rock and your virtual machines and your acid-washed jeans and your Ernest Hemingway and your object-oriented languages and your fax machines and your hula hoops and your zoot suits and your strange slang phrases like "That's so bogus" or "What a shocking bad hat" and those atonal composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Milton Babbit that you kids seem to like these days and your cubist painters and your Ally McBeal and that guy in Titanic and your TCP/IP protocol and your heads filled with all that Cartesian dualism these days and ... well, I just don't get you kids. <shakes head ruefully again>
A.M. Kuchling, 1 Oct 1998
E.g., at the REBOL prompt I typed
send tim@email.msn.com "Did this work?"
and in response it dialed my modem, connected to my ISP, and then
REBOL crashed after provoking an invalid page fault in
kernel32.dll. Then my connection broke, and the modem dialed and
connected again. Then it just sat there until it timed out.
now-that's-user-friendly<wink>-ly y'rs
Tim Peters, 24 Sep 1998
I've reinvented the idea of variables and types as in a programming language, something I do on every project.
Greg Ward, September 1998
"The event/tree dualism reminds me why I always wanted to be able to do pattern matching on trees."
"'Honey, what is this guy doing up there?' 'Oh, I suppose it's Christian, trying to match some patterns.' "
Christian Tismer and Dirk Heise, 12 Oct 1998
Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.
Larry Wall, 14 Oct 1998
"What's the opinion of the (wink) Python luminaries?"
"The last time I saw a position paper from them, they came out strongly against the suggestion that old people be put on ice floes and left to drift out to sea to die.
they-never-like-any-of-my-ideas-ly y'rs"
Stuart Hungerford and Tim Peters, 14 Oct 1998
Rather than borrowing from our beauty-impaired ugly sibling, why not look at Java, the beautiful, conceited sister? We could have something more like JavaDoc.
Paul Prescod, 18 Oct 1998
It won't work. This is far too concrete a problem to interest Tim. I see 3 possible approaches:
1) Claim that Python can't do a <some random combination of 'L', 'R', 'A'> grammar. This will yield an irate response from Aaron which will draw Tim into it and you'll get a solution in 3 months after lots of entertaining posts.
2) Turn it into an optimization problem and get a solution from Marc- Andre using mxTextTools next week.
3) Turn it into an obfuscation problem and get competing solutions from Greg Stein and Fredrik tomorrow morning.
if-anybody's-found-don-beaudry's-sucker-button-let-me-know ly 'yrs
Gordon McMillan, 16 Oct 1998
To my battle-scarred mind, documentation is never more than a hint. Read it once with disbelief suspended, and then again with full throttle skepticism.
Gordon McMillan, 19 Oct 1998
Then let the record show that I hereby formally lobby for such an optimization! I'd lay out some arguments, except that it's already implemented <wink>.
well-that-one-went-easy-ly y'rs - tim
Tim Peters, 20 Oct 1998
We did requirements and task analysis, iterative design, and user testing. You'd almost think programming languages were an interface between people and computers.
Steven Pemberton, one of the designers of Python's direct ancestor ABC
Not at all, although I agree here too <wink>. It's like saying a fork is broken just because it's not that handy for jacking up a car. That is, Guido implemented the syntax to support default arguments, and it works great for that purpose! Using it to fake closures is a hack, and the "hey, this is cool!" / "hey, this really sucks!" mixed reaction thus follows, much as pain follows a car falling on your skull. Stick to stabbing peas, or even teensy pea-sized closures, and a fork serves very well.
Tim Peters, 31 Oct 1998
My customers consider it a marketable skill that I a) think for myself b) share my thoughts with them.
Paul Prescod, 2 Nov 1998
Anyone else know what a Stanley #45 plane is? ... it's not what you use if you aren't looking to produce intricate moldings. If you want to make a tabletop flat, and bring out the natural beauty of the wood, you use a big, long and flat bench plane. The beauty is in the wood, not the tool, the tool is just the right one to let you see that and to let others see it too.
And that's a very impressive kind of beauty in itself, isn't it? The kind of beauty some say is homely--an uninteresting face, boring angles, few if any parts, no curly flowers. It's just a tool, and not beautiful at all. But look, that tool makes beauty. It makes it *easy* to make beautiful things, to see deep into the the grain of whatever material you're working.
Maybe it gets us a little closer to art.
Ivan Van Laningham, 3 Nov 1998
You might think "That's illegal." That's not illegal; that's cool.
Paul Dubois at IPC7, on recursive template definitions in C++
This supports reflection, which is the 90s way of writing self- modifying code.
John Aycock at IPC7, during his parsing talk
It turns out that docstrings are the only way to associate information with functions, which is what led you to abuse them in such a fascinating and stomach-churning way.
Jim Hugunin at IPC7, on embedding BNF parsing rules in docstrings
"The Mayans looked on the integers as gods."
"What did the Mayans think of integer division?"
Ivan Van Laningham and an unknown audience member at IPC7
Y2K problem? The Mayans didn't have a millennium-2K problem!
Eric S. Raymond at IPC7, on learning that the Mayan calendar takes 28 octillion years to wrap around
"Generic identifier" -- think about it too much and your head explodes.
Sean McGrath at IPC7, discussing SGML terminology
Nothing I've ever written has reached 1.0.
Greg Ward at IPC7, on using small version numbers
Well, that's a little thing -- the specification.
Guido van Rossum at IPC7
"We've got a name (Module Distribution Utilities) that gives us a good 3-letter acronym to group things under: MDU."
"<thpftbt>"
Greg Ward and Jeremy Hylton at IPC7
Mailman is designed to be extensible and comprehensible. Without comprehensibility, enhancement is self-limiting -- functionality may be improved, but further enhancement gets increasingly difficult.
Ken Manheimer at IPC7
"Generating Usable Installations" -- OK, you've got the GUI SIG.
Barry Warsaw at IPC7, on the choice of name for a SIG to discuss extension building
Performance is a lot like drugs -- it doesn't do much for you, but it occupies a lot of your time.
Jeremy Hylton at IPC7, on the need for a Performance SIG
I made some slides, but they suck, so I won't bother with them.
Andrew Kuchling at IPC7
"What's Python?"
"It's a computer programming language."
"You mean, like DOS?"
Some guy in a bar and Eric S. Raymond (who was wearing a conference T-shirt) at IPC7
Excellent plan! Devious minds are attracted to Python, like mimes to unappreciative crowds.
Tim Peters, 13 Nov 1998
Ha! If we had only started numbering dimensions with one, we'd already be living in a 4-D world, and Mental Organons would be *all over the place*!
Tim Peters, 13 Nov 1998
Well, during those periods when I was me, there was most assuredly only one of me. But during some of the more intense discussions, I was not me, and while all the rest of the attendees were also not me, it is difficult to say whether they were the same not me that I was or wasn't at the time.
Gordon McMillan, 18 Nov 1998
If Python strays into trying to be something completely new it will fail, like Scheme, K and Smalltalk. There are both technical and sociological reasons for this. If you stray too far technically, you make mistakes: either you make modelling mistakes because you don't have an underlying logical model (i.e. C++ inheritance) or you make interface mistakes because you don't understand how your new paradigm will be used by real programmers.
Let research languages innovate. Python integrates.
Paul Prescod, 21 Nov 1998
"I got a little mad at the way python polynomials were written -- the code looked like its author knew neither polynomials nor Python."
"That would be me :-)."
Moshe Zadka and Guido van Rossum, 22 Nov 1998
I would recommend not wasting any more time on the naming issue. (This is a recurring theme in my posts -- remember, I spent about 0.3 microseconds thinking about whether "Python" would be a good name for a programming language, and I've never regretted it.)
Guido van Rossum, 25 Nov 1998
"My course members are almost all coming from Math, and the first question was 'why isn't it complete?' Just a matter of elegance."
"Oh, don't worry. My background is math. This is actually good for them -- like discovering that Santa Claus doesn't really exist."
Christian Tismer and Guido van Rossum, 2 Dec 1998
One of my cheap entertainments is axiomatizing characterizations of [Tim Peters]. I think I've come up with a minimal one: the only c.l.p poster more concerned with working non-legal code than non-working legal code.
Cameron Laird, 2 Dec 1998
PYTHON = (P)rogrammers (Y)earning (T)o (H)omestead (O)ur (N)oosphere.
Seen in Sean McGrath's .sig, 3 Dec 1998
I never realized it before, but having looked that over I'm certain I'd rather have my eyes burned out by zombies with flaming dung sticks than work on a conscientious Unicode regex engine.
Tim Peters, 3 Dec 1998
"Python? Oh, I've heard of that. I have a friend at the NSA who uses it."
Overhead at a meeting, quoted in c.l.p on 3 Dec 1998
I think Gordon has priority on this one, since it's clearly a consequence of his observation that tim_one despises and deplores anything useful. Which has greater explanatory power, since I've often noted that tim_one complains about legal working code too! Anything that works may be useful, right? Brrrrr. Must destroy.
Tim Peters in the third person, 3 Dec 1998