This page quotes what some other people have said about the PythonLanguage. It's not a list of memorable quotes from the Python community, only of quotes that tells us something about Python itself... For python community quotes, see A. M. Kuchling's Python Quotes and the DDJ Python-URLs

1. Python is easy to learn, but it still scales well.
2. Programmers create more value with less code using Python.
3. Python is versatile and rich
4. Python is designed for humans
5. Python is Fun

1 Python is easy to learn, but it still scales well.

I had lamented that it ws a long time since I had a practial hacking environment, and Dan Connolly suggested Python as something you could start quickly but which would scale to a large system. One day, 15 minutes before I had to leave for the airport, I got my laptop back out of my bag, and sucked off the web the python 1.6 system and the python tutorial, and a copy of a small notation3 parser Dan had hacked together. I was happy to find that Python is a language you can get into on one battery! I have been happily hacking ever since.

--Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world-wide-web

It's a great language for beginners, it's a great language for large projects and teamwork, and it enjoys a breathtaking array of convenient accessories. Python is the one language with which we feel safe in recommending for all situations.

--Which language is right for you?, Cameron Laird and Kathryn Soraiz, Unix Insider

Python is a cool little language. It is well designed, compact, easy to learn and fun to program in. Python strongly encourages the programmer to program in an OO-way, but does not require it. In my opinion, it is one of the best languages to use when learning OO-programming.

--Paul Barry in Linux Journal

Python is an excellent language for learning object orientation. (It also happens to be my favorite OO scripting language.)

--Sriram Srinivasan in Advanced Perl Programming, page 120

I found it to be one of the most intuitive languages I've ever worked with -- you can often just guess the syntax and it works. Its other great strength is its scalability; it makes sense from command-line interaction all the way up to large-scale modular programs.

--Steve Freeman

I talked my other colleagues into using {Python} for our CS 1 course this fall. ... In the past I would be swamped during office hours with students wanting help deciphering C++ compiler errors. This semester almost nobody has stopped by for syntax issues.

--Dave Reed on Python In Education mailing list

Python rules over the realm of scripting languages. It shines by its simplicity, its clear syntax and the fact that it can truly be learned in a matter of a day or two.

--N. Devillard and Yves Jung

2 Programmers create more value with less code using Python.

I was amazed by the amount {of} flexibility and self-awareness that Python had. When a 20,000 line project went to approximately 3,000 lines overnight, and came out being more flexible and robust once it had been completed, I realized I was on to something really good.

--Matthew "Glyph" Lefkowitz

...However, it did provide a hard measurement on the benefits of using Python instead of C++: the lines of Python code was 10% of the equivalent C++ code. ... From a software engineering standpoint, this was a tremendous success. Bug counts are always proportional to the number of lines of code, meaning that the Python version should have 10% of the bugs of the C++ version. Further, the fewer lines of code meant that it would have a smaller and more understandable "footprint" in the developers' minds. The Python code was arguably more maintainable due to its improved readability and rapid edit-test cycle (no compile and link step). Lastly, the server could also be shown to be more robust - being entirely in Python, it was not subject to memory-related coding errors such as null pointers, buffer misallocation and overruns, or unfreed or doubly-freed memory...

--Greg Stein, eShop

{Python is} "the most efficient language I've ever used. It's 10 times better than any of the other tools I have used. It's free, it's object-oriented, it adapts to everything, it runs on everything. There is almost an indescribable, 'quality without a name' attraction on my part".

--Bruce Eckel, author of "Thinking in C++", "Thinking in Java" etc.

Python is optimized for things like software quality, portability, integration, and productivity. It fosters maintainable systems that run just about everywhere and can be freely mixed with other software components. But productivity is really the name of the game in Python: It's focused on speed of development, not speed of execution. That is, it's about making life easier for developers, not computers. Because of that, Python programs are typically a fraction of the size and complexity of their equivalents in C++ or Java, so they can be written and debugged much quicker.

--Mark Lutz, author of Programming Python

In my opinion we could not have delivered {the} product with the manpower we had if we'd been using any language other than Python. That, in the end, is the final proof of concept for Python: that we could do the impossible.

--Eric Lee Green

As this decade progresses I expect to see an ever increasing use of dynamically typed languages, such as Python, Ruby, and even Smalltalk. These languages are often referred to as "scripting languages." I think this is a gross injustice. It is these languages, and languages of their kind, that will be mainstream industrial languages in the coming years.

--Robert Martin in IT World.com.

3 Python is versatile and rich

Python's single most important selling point is the richness of its standard library

--Frank Stajano

It's easy to understand why I use Python. It's flexible, easy, and powerful in a way that cannot be matched by other mainstream languages.

--Paul Prescod

The combination of simplicity, power, extensibility, and free distribution rights makes Python an increasingly popular programming language and has made it the obvious choice for integration with Poser.

--Curious Labs

On the one hand, Python is very similar to Java in terms of how one might apply it to build solutions and the kind of features it supports. Like Java, it is object-oriented, runs bytecode, and works well for server-side Web applications. Like Java, you can use Python to build client-side applets. ... you can write applets in Python and compile them into Java bytecode for use with any Java 1.1-enabled browser. These are but a few examples of Python's depth.

Unlike Java, Python is ideal for tossing together a quick script to do mundane work. ... Python is even easier to use in doing mundane tasks than Unix shell script languages, and it is infinitely more powerful. That demonstrates its breadth.

--Nicholas Petreley, Python: The one-size-fits-all programming language

Under Python I have several excellent modules for what I want to do. If I need something there is usually almost a library available for it. Or it is easy to make my own library using other Python libraries.

And the available libraries have ALLWAYS been better than the commercial stuff I have spend my cash on in MS land.

--Max M

Python is an excellent choice for a game scripting language because it is powerful, easily embedded, can seamlessly be extended with C/C++ code, has most of the advanced features that make scripting languages worthwhile, and can also be used for automating production. Additionally, the books, development tools and libraries available for Python provide great opportunities for benefiting from the work of others.

--Bruce Dawson

4 Python is designed for humans

Programming in Python is fun. It's easy to learn, it makes you more productive, and it makes you think about programming differently. Learning Python has made me a better C++ programmer.

Happy programmers who are learning faster are going to be more productive, and they're going to create better games. The team at Humongous that is using Python for game programming has the highest morale in the company.

--Bruce Dawson

The Python way, I now realize, eliminates a whole class of errors that arise when a mis-indented program makes you mis-perceive its true block structure. In Python, what you see is what you get, and there are almost no choices about how you format your code.

--Jon Udell

In the months since I first evaluated Python, I've had no stability problems and the language and API always seem to do what I expect.

--Brent Burley, Walt Disney Feature Animation

A couple of years ago I went actively looking for a good scripting language, looking at things like Perl, various scheme implementations, etc. Python was by far the best alternative I found. Scripting languages as a class have a couple of things going for them -- automatic memory management, fast turn around times, and decent built-in resizable data structures. They also tend to have terrible syntaxes (Perl is just bizarre, Scheme is simple and elegant if you're a computer). Python syntax falls more or less into the Algol camp (e.g. C/C++, Pascal, etc) which I still find to be the easiest to actually read.

--Curtis Bartley

Because Python has the utility of Perl and the elegance of Java. Because Python fully follows the object-oriented model and, also importantly, because Python enforces writing style and Python code is easily read by mere mortals.

--Howard Dyckoff

I am just barely old enough to have programmed in batch FORTRAN for a few months back in the 1970s. Most hackers aren't these days, but somehow our culture seems to have retained a pretty accurate folk memory of how nasty those old-style fixed-field languages were. ... It's hard to blame anyone, on seeing this Python feature, for initially reacting as though they had unexpectedly stepped in a steaming pile of dinosaur dung.

--Eric S. Raymond about his first experience with Python, realizing that it uses indentation instead of braces for block structure.

Oddly enough, Python's use of whitespace stopped feeling unnatural after about twenty minutes. I just indented code, pretty much as I would have done in a C program anyway, and it worked.

That was my first surprise. My second came a couple of hours into the project, when I noticed (allowing for pauses needed to look up new features in Programming Python) I was generating working code nearly as fast as I could type. When I realized this, I was quite startled. ... it generally means you've achieved mastery of the language. But that didn't make sense, because it was still day one ...

This was my first clue that, in Python, I was actually dealing with an exceptionally good design. Most languages have so much friction and awkwardness built into their design that you learn most of their feature set long before your misstep rate drops anywhere near zero. Python was the first general-purpose language I'd ever used that reversed this process.

--Eric S. Raymond eventually tried some Python programming after all.

Hats off to them. It's an extremely well designed language. It's object orientated from the get-go. They've really succeeded there,

--Monte Davidoff, Microsoft Altair BASIC legend who thinks Python is the ideal teaching language.

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, "Structured Programming with goto Statements", Computing Surveys, Vol 6 No 4, Dec. 1974

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

5 Python is Fun

The Zen of Python

• Beautiful is better than ugly.
• Explicit is better than implicit.
• Simple is better than complex.
• Complex is better than complicated.
• Flat is better than nested.
• Sparse is better than dense.
• Readability counts.
• Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
• Although practicality beats purity.
• Errors should never pass silently.
• Unless explicitly silenced.
• In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
• There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
• Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
• Now is better than never.
• Although never is often better than right now.
• If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
• If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
• Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

  --Tim Peters

Python is executable pseudocode. Perl is executable line noise.

--Who said this first?

Python - Because other languages suck worse

--Someone on comp.lang.python

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

--Cardinal Ximinez of Spain (or was that Michael Palin in disguise?)