Everyone knows that any scripting language shootout that doesn't show Python as the best language is faulty by
design.
— Max M
Every sufficiently advanced LISP application will eventually reimplement Python.
— Hodgson's Law
The canonical, "Python is a great first language", elicited, "Python is a great last language!"
— Noah Spurrier
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.
— Guido van Rossum
Python is the "most powerful language you can still read".
— Paul Dubois (Mentioned in the 2002/01/22 Python-URL! by Paul Boddie)
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.
— Donald E. Knuth, in "Structured Programming with goto Statements", Computing
Surveys, Vol 6 No 4, Dec. 1974
"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 <wink>.
— Tim Peters
In many ways, it's a dull language, borrowing solid old concepts from many other languages & styles: boring
syntax, unsurprising semantics, few automatic coercions, etc etc. But that's one of the things I like about
Python.
— Tim Peters
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 (Steve was one of the designers of Python's direct ancestor ABC)
As it seems to me, in Perl you have to be an expert to correctly make a nested data structure like, say, a list of
hashes of instances. In Python, you have to be an idiot not to be able to do it, because you just write it
down.
— Peter Norvig (comp.lang.functional)