I can see the FAQ now...
Q1.1.2.3: Why can't I divide integers?
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 ring, 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.
Johann Hibschman, 4 Mar 2000
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 <wink>.
Tim Peters, 4 Mar 2000
The reason I'm right is that I said there won't be any single "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 and elephants and fish and seals and birds, because there will be many diverse "habitats" where the particular adaptations of each will be needed/advantageous.
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.
Ran, 5 Mar 2000
"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