[On regression testing] Another approach is to renounce all worldly goods and retreat to a primitive cabin in Montana, where you can live a life of purity, unpolluted by technological change. But now and then you can send out little packages....
Aaron Watters
Ah, you're a recent victim of forceful evangelization. Write your own assert module, use it, and come back in a few months to tell me whether it really caught 90% of your bugs.
Guido van Rossum, 7 Feb 1997
The larger scientific computing centers generally have a "theory" division and a "actually uses the computer" <wink> division. The theory division generally boasts some excellent theoreticians and designers, while the other division generally boasts some excellent physical scientists who simply want to get their work done. In most labs I've seen, the two divisions hate each others' guts (or, rarely, blissfully ignore each other), & the politics is so thick you float on it even after they embed your feet in cement blocks (hence even the simple relief of death is denied you <wink>).
Tim Peters, 25 Mar 1997
In one particular way the conflict is fundamental & eternal: the "working scientists" generally understand the hardware du jour perfectly, and passionately resent any attempt to prevent them from fiddling with it directly -- while the theory folks are forever inventing new ways to hide the hardware du jour. That two groups can both be so right and so wrong at the same time is my seventh proof for the existence of God ...
Tim Peters, 25 Mar 1997
You're going to be in a minority - you're coming to Python programming from a language which offers you a lot more in the way of comfortable operations than Python, instead of coming from medieval torture chambers like C or Fortran, which offer so much less.
Andrew Mullhaupt, 26 Jun 1997
...although Python uses an obsolete approach to memory management, it is a good implementation of that approach, as opposed to S, which uses a combination of bad implementation and demented design decisions to arrive at what may very well be the worst memory behavior of any actually useful program.
Andrew Mullhaupt, 26 Jun 1997
I suggested holding a "Python Object Oriented Programming Seminar", but the acronym was unpopular.
Joseph Strout, 28 Feb 1997
Strangely enough I saw just such a beast at the grocery store last night. Starbucks sells Javachip. (It's ice cream, but that shouldn't be an obstacle for the Java marketing people.)
Jeremy Hylton, 29 Apr 1997
A little girl goes into a pet show and asks for a wabbit. The shop keeper looks down at her, smiles and says:
"Would you like a lovely fluffy little white rabbit, or a cutesy wootesly little brown rabbit?"
"Actually", says the little girl, "I don't think my python would notice."
Told by Nick Leaton, 4 Dec 1996
When I originally designed Perl 5's OO, I thought about a lot of this stuff, and chose the explicit object model of Python as being the least confusing. So far I haven't seen a good reason to change my mind on that.
Larry Wall, 27 Feb 1997 on perl5-porters
Notes:
(1) Many of you many not be aware of the fabulously successful 'Guido for President' Campaign. While Guido has no interest in being the president, the PSA thought it would be a cool way to collect money. The centerpiece of the campaign featured an attractive offer to spend the night in Guido's spare bedroom in exchange for a $50,000.00 contribution. (Mark Lutz stayed TWICE!)
(2) Since the proliferation of Monty Python related names (Python, Monty, Grail, Eric-the-Half-a-Compiler, et al.) has increased over the past year, the PSA felt it would be wise to licencing the Python name to forestall any lawsuits. An added benefit is that John Cleese is teaching Guido how to walk funny.
(3) Pre-Release vacations are spent in the Catskills. Post-Release vacations are spent in the Bahamas. Guido is currently working on a system which will allow him to make more releases of Python; thus octupling the number of vacations he takes in a year.
Matthew Lewis Carroll Smith, 4 Apr 1997
I mean, just take a look at Joe Strout's brilliant little "python for beginners" page. Replace all print-statements with sys.stdout.write( string.join(map(str, args)) + "\n") and you surely won't get any new beginners. And That Would Be A Very Bad Thing.
Fredrik Lundh, 27 Aug 1996
Ya, ya, ya, except ... if I were built out of KSR chips, I'd be running at 25 or 50 MHz, and would be wrong about ALMOST EVERYTHING almost ALL THE TIME just due to being a computer! Think about it -- when's the last time you spent 20 hours straight debugging your son/wife/friend/neighbor/dog/ferret/snake? And they still fell over anyway? Except in a direction you've never seen before each time you try it? The easiest way to tell you're dealing with a computer is when the other side keeps making the same moronic misteakes over and misteakes over and misteakes over and misteakes over and misteakes over and misteakes CTRL-C again.
Tim Peters, 30 Apr 1997
BTW, a member of the ANSI C committee once told me that the only thing rand is used for in C code is to decide whether to pick up the axe or throw the dwarf, and if that's true I guess "the typical libc rand" is adequate for all but the most fanatic of gamers <wink>.
Tim Peters, 21 June 1997.
Things in Python are very clear, but are harder to find than the secrets of wizards. Things in Perl are easy to find, but look like arcane spells to invoke magic.
Mike Meyer, 6 Nov 1997
Indeed, as Palin has come to understand, being part of Python means never really knowing what may lurk around the corner.
"We've never really followed any rules at all with Python," he said. "We're a spontaneous lot. It's more fun that way."
Michael Palin, quoted from a Reuters/Variety news item titled "Rare Python Reunion", Jan 15 1998.
Python is an excellent language for learning object orientation. (It also happens to be my favorite OO scripting language.)
Advanced Perl Programming
The point is that newbies almost always read more into the semantics of release than are specified, so it's worthwile to be explicit about how little is being said <wink>.
Tim Peters, 12 Feb 1998
Ah! "Never mind" to a bunch of what I said before (this editor can't move backwards <wink>).
Tim Peters, 12 Feb 1998
After 1.5 years of Python, I'm still discovering richness (and still unable to understand what the hell Jim Fulton is talking about).
Gordon McMillan, 13 Mar 1998
Tabs are good, spaces are bad and mixing the two just means that your motives are confused and that you don't use enough functions.
John J. Lehmann, 19 Mar 1998
... but whenever optimization comes up, people get sucked into debates about exciting but elaborate schemes not a one of which ever gets implemented; better to get an easy 2% today than dream about 100% forever.
Tim Peters, 22 Mar 1998
I've been playing spoilsport in an attempt to get tabnanny.py working, but now that there's absolutely no reason to continue with this, the amount of my life I'm willing to devote to it is unbounded <0.9 wink>.
Tim Peters, 30 Mar 1998
Python is a little weak in forcing encapsulation. It isn't made for bondage and domination environments.
Paul Prescod, 30 Mar 1998
One of my first big programming assignments as a student of computer science was a source formatter for Pascal. The assignment was designed to show us the real-life difficulties of group programming projects. It succeeded perhaps too well. For a long time, I was convinced that source code formatters were a total waste of time, and decided to write beautiful code that no automatic formatter could improve upon. In fact, I would intentionally write code that formatters could only make worse.
Guido van Rossum, 31 Mar 1998
You need to build a system that is futureproof; it's no good just making a modular system. You need to realize that your system is just going to be a module in some bigger system to come, and so you have to be part of something else, and it's a bit of a way of life.
Tim Berners-Lee, at the WWW7 conference