"Complexity" seems to be a lot like "energy": you can transfer it from the end user to one/some of the other players, but the total amount seems to remain pretty much constant for a given task.
Ran, 5 Mar 2000
LaTeX2HTML is pain.
Fred Drake in a documentation checkin message, 14 Mar 2000
Here, have some cycles of reversed kielbasa. And ten (10 (0xa (101010b))) Usenet Points, redeemable in comp.lang.python for increased local prestige. Some prestige may depend upon your own actions. Local Prestige may or may not have any effect on your actual life (or lack thereof).
William Tanksley, 21 Mar 2000
Mucking with builtins is fun the way huffing dry erase markers is fun. Things are very pretty at first, but eventually the brain cell lossage will more than outweigh that cheap thrill.
Barry Warsaw, 23 Mar 2000
>Have you ever looked at the
output of a bib | tbl | eqn pipeline?
Are you kids still using that as a pick-up line?
Roy Smith and Cameron Laird, 4 Apr 2000
This is like getting lost in a dictionary. What does quincuncial mean anyhow?
Dennis Hamilton, 4 Apr 2000
UTF-8 has a certain purity in that it equally annoys every nation, and is nobody's default encoding.
Andy Robinson, 10 Apr 2000
"Now if we could figure out where python programmers are from, someone could write a book and get rich."
"Yorkshire."
Quinn Dunkan and Warren Postma, 11 Apr 2000
If I didn't have my part-time performance art income to help pay the bills, I could never afford to support my programming lifestyle.
Jeff Bauer, 21 Apr 2000
Of course, this brought me face to face once again with Python's pons asinorum, the significance of whitespace.
Eric S. Raymond, in the Linux Journal's Python supplement
Surprisingly enough, Python has taught me more about Lisp than Lisp ever did ;-).
Glyph Lefkowitz, 3 May 2000
How about we notate the hungarian notation with the type of hungarian notation, you know, hungarian meta notation: HWND aWin32ApiHandleDefinedInWindowsDotH_hwndWindowHandle;
Warren Postma, 4 May 2000
Note that Python's licence is in fact the MIT X11 licence, with MIT filed off and CNRI written in its place in crayon.
A.M. Kuchling, 5 May 2000
Once you've read and understood The Art of the Metaobject Protocol you are one quarter of the way to provisional wizard status. (The other three-fourths are b) understanding Haskell's monads, c) grokking Prolog, and d) becoming handy with a combinator- based language by implementing a Forth.)
Neel Krishnaswami, 9 May 2000
"The future" has arrived but they forgot to update the docs.
R. David Murray, 9 May 2000
/* This algorithm is from a book written before the invention of structured programming... */
Comment in parser/pgen.c, noted by Michael Hudson
For more information please see my unpublished manuscript on steam driven turing machines. [2000pp in crayon donated to the harvard library -- they never told me whether they filed it under mathematics, philosophy, logic, mechanical engineering, or computational science]
Aaron Watters, 12 May 2000
Me? I hate the whole lambda calculus, not because of what it is, but because of what many people think it is. They think that it's the whole of computer science, the ultimate way to express and reason about programs, when in reality it's merely a shabby and incomplete model of how Fortran fails to work. The first thing SICP has to do is teach everyone how bad the lambda calculus model is -- as part of teaching them about a language allegedly based on lambda calculus.
I'm sorry, was my bias showing again? :-)
William Tanksley, 13 May 2000
I never got beyond starting the data-structures in C++, I never got beyond seeing how it would work in Scheme. I finished it in one Python -filled afternoon, and discovered the idea sucked big time. I was glad I did it in Python, because it only cost me one afternoon to discover the idea sucks.
Moshe Zadka, 13 May 2000
In truth, we use 'j' to represent sqrt(-1) for exactly the same reason we use a convention for the direction of current which is exactly the opposite of the direction the electrons actually travel: because it drives physicists crazy. (And if we pick up a few mathematicians or whatever along the way, well, that's just gravy. ;-)
Grant R. Griffin, 14 May 2000
Unicode: everyone wants it, until they get it.
Barry Warsaw, 16 May 2000
I saw a hack you sent me a few months ago and approved of its intent and was saddened by its necessity.
Jim Fulton, 16 May 2000
Suspicions are most easily dispelled/confirmed via evidence, and taking the trouble to do this has the pleasant side-effect that you can either cease expending effort worrying, or move directly to taking positive action to correct the problem.
Neel Krishnaswami, 21 May 2000
Thanks to the overnight turnaround and the early interpreter's habit of returning nothing at all useful if faced with a shortage of )s, one could easily detect the LISP users: they tended to walk around with cards full of )))))))... in their shirt pockets, to be slapped onto the end of submitted card decks: one at least got something back if there were too many )s.
John W. Baxter, 21 May 2000
Python: embodies a harmony of chocolate kisses with hints of jasmine and rose. Trussardi's wild new fragrance.
From Marie Claire, Australian edition, May 2000; noted by Fiona Czuczman
In arts, compromises yield mediocre results. The personality and vision of the artist has to go through. I like to see Python as a piece of art. I just hope the artist will not get too tainted by usability studies.
François Pinard, 22 May 2000
In fact, I've never seen an argument about which I cared less. I'm completely case insensitivity insensitive.
William Tanksley, 23 May 2000
They boo-ed when Dylan went electric. But for me its about the instincts of a designer, and the faith of a fan. Not science. So much the better.
Arthur Siegel, 23 May 2000
Burroughs did something very odd with COBOL at one point (and no, it wasn't The Naked Lunch).
Will Rose, 27 May 2000
Code generators are hacks. Sometimes necessary hacks, but hacks nevertheless.
Paul Prescod, 7 Jun 2000
Very rough; like estimating the productivity of a welder by the amount of acetylene used.
Paul Svensson, on measuring programmer productivity by lines of code, 19 Jun 2000
I vote for backward compatibility for now, and not only because that will irritate /F the most.
Tim Peters, 30 Jun 2000
A comment is in order then. If the code is smarter than it looks, most people aren't going to think it looks very smart.
Jeremy Hylton, 6 Jul 2000
You and I think too much alike ?!ng. And if that doesn't scare you now, you should have a talk with Gordon.
Barry Warsaw, 12 Jul 2000
Isn't it somewhat of a political statement to allow marriages of three or more items? I always presumed that this function was n-ary, like map().
Paul Prescod, on the proposed name marry() for a function to combine sequences, 12 Jul 2000
Since my finger was slowest reaching my nose, I got elected Editor. On the positive side of that, I get to make the early decisions that will be cursed for generations of Python hackers to come.
Barry Warsaw, 12 Jul 2000
Hey, you know, we can work this in. Sailor Moon + Giant Robots + Tentacle Demons + Python Conference == Bizarre hilarity ensues!
Alexander Williams, 4 Aug 2000
The rapid establishment of social ties, even of a fleeting nature, advance not only that goal but its standing in the uberconscious mesh of communal psychic, subjective, and algorithmic interbeing. But I fear I'm restating the obvious.
Will Ware, 28 Aug 2000
The comp.lang.python newsgroup erupted last week with a flurry of posts that accused the Python development team of creeping featurism, selling out the language to corporate interests, moving too fast, and turning a deaf ear to the Python community. What triggered this lava flow of accusations? The development team accepted a proposal to change the syntax of the print statement.
Stephen Figgins, 30 Aug 2000
INTERVIEWER: Tell us how you came to be drawn into the world of pragmas.
COMPILER WRITER: Well, it started off with little things. Just a few boolean flags, a way to turn asserts on and off, debug output, that sort of thing. I thought, what harm can it do? It's not like I'm doing anything you couldn't do with command line switches, right? Then it got a little bit heavier, integer values for optimisation levels, even the odd string or two. Before I knew it I was doing the real hard stuff, constant expressions, conditionals, the whole shooting box. Then one day when I put in a hook for making arbitrary calls into the interpreter, that was when I finally realised I had a problem...
Greg Ewing, 31 Aug 2000
The modules people have built for Python are like the roads the Romans built through Europe. On this solid ground, you can move fast as you work on aspects of program design that aren't so analytical -- user interface, multi-threaded event dispatching models, all kinds of things that can be done a lot of different ways and are hard to get right the first time through.
Donn Cave, 3 Sep 2000
Python 2.0 beta 1 is now available from BeOpen PythonLabs. There is a long list of new features since Python 1.6, released earlier today. We don't plan on any new releases in the next 24 hours.
Jeremy Hylton, in the 2.0b1 announcement, 5 Sep 2000
Fortunately, you've left that madness behind, and entered the clean, happy, and safe Python world of transvestite lumberjacks and singing Vikings.
Quinn Dunkan, 17 Sep 2000
Regular expressions are among my most valued tools, along with goto, eval, multiple inheritance, preemptive multithreading, floating point, run-time type identification, a big knife, a bottle of bleach, and 120VAC electricity. All of these things suck sometimes.
Kragen Sitaker, 27 Sep 2000