I NEED to TEACH you something, QUICK!

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

Good morning, Python Mailing List.

> >You raped 10 women...
> only 1
> >massacred children...
> 13 year olds are not children in my culture
> >And killed my Irish Setter on Saturday.        
> YOU PIG YOU PIG IT WAS AN IRISH WOLFHOUND!!!!

I've got to say that I'm a little concerned by the fact that the first
unsolicited posting (that I'm aware of) about our software comes along
with a discussion of raping women, massacring children, and killing
household pets.  I suppose, having recently integrated more code that
changes an instance's class at run-time, it was only to be expected.

> Hej Twisted Matrix!  Are you chaos wizards or order wizards or a mix?

As to the alignment of the Twisted Matrix as a whole; personally, I'm a
chaotic-neutral elven wizard.  Other currently active party members
include Moshe Zadka, an ordered-good dwarven warrior, Allen Short, a
chaotic-good human Archeologist, and Chris Armstrong, a neutral-neutral
thief.  We have some in reserve of varying alignments and character
classes.

> Have you figured out yet that your hacks will go to hell if half of
> you guys are doing `first we remove sufficient order in order to find
> the creative heart of chaos' while across the street `first we tidy up
> a bit, adding enough order until our eyes stop hurting'.

Both of these seem misguided approaches to me.

I don't search for the creative heart of chaos or my inner child while I'm
programming; I look for an approach to solving the problem which works
well.  Doing that usually involves a blend of order and chaos, but also
many other things which don't neatly fall into one category or other.  In
fact, *most* things it involves don't.

In a general form, though, our process is something like eXtreme
programming.  Lots of unit tests, and issues get fixed as they come up.  
We try very hard never to have a CVS repository which is broken.  We
refactor all the time and consider the simplicity of the code a feature
which we're always working towards.  Functionality is an asset but code is
a liability.  Is this "chaotic" or "ordered"?  We recognize that change
(chaos?) is a necessary and good part of development, but we have a plan
(order?) for managing it.

Of course, we like everything to be just a little bit silly (as you may
have noticed in our naming scheme), otherwise writing all this software
for free would be no fun.

> Unless the hack is `make the coolest party in the universe' <the ORDER
> guys handle the ordering of things, unless you like having to make a
> musical production for a band that happens to have 37 trombones in it>

I don't know if that's "the hack", but we certainly are 'the coolest party
in the universe'.

> you are better off with seprate namespaces.  This is the most
> important thing I learned in the last 10 years, so I hope you either

The most important thing *I* learned in the last ten years was "don't use
acetylene as cake frosting", which is probably a more important lesson
(especially if you're baking the cake).  However, in the interests of
learning from your experience; separate namespaces for what?  Given that
we're using python, we have separate namespaces for every module and our
coding standard forbids "from ... import *".

> think that it is valuable time saved, or that you are all rolling
> around the isles now laughing because you are way too cool for
> limitations like that, and my problem is that I am not twisted enough
> to make it work.  Can I come over and talk sometime? Or is this a
> no-old-farts sort of thing?

You are certainly welcome to come over and talk sometime.  We're on
irc.openprojects.net #python almost 24 hours a day...

Old farts are also not only allowed, but encouraged.  Much of my design
style was gleaned by listening to my father talk about the halcyon days of
APL on the mainframe and Smalltalk in the enterprise, before all this Java
and C++ nonsense took hold, as well as hanging around Lispers and
listening to them wish, teary-eyed, that the lisp machine would make a
comeback somehow.

If you look carefully at the way 'twistd' works, and you replace "pickle"
with "image", you'll note some startling similiarities between Smalltalk
servers and Twisted ones.

Thanks for the recognition; as they say, "no publicity is bad publicity".

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