Obligatory Monty Python Reference Goes Here
October 31, 2015 4:43 PM   Subscribe

 
It just occurred to me that that title might mislead people into thinking this is a Monty Python post. It is not -- the title is an injoke concerning the fact that it's a tradition for books that teach the Python programming language to use Monty Python references in their code examples.

This really has nothing to do with brilliant British comedy beyond that. This post is pretty much hardcore geekery. I apologize for any confusion.
posted by JHarris at 4:45 PM on October 31, 2015 [2 favorites]


Even so, can I take the opportunity to brag that I got to see John Cleese and Eric Idle live in Baltimore last night?
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:50 PM on October 31, 2015 [2 favorites]


Even so, can I take the opportunity to brag that I got to see John Cleese and Eric Idle live in Baltimore last night?

No, I'm sorry, there isn't time.
posted by dragstroke at 5:26 PM on October 31, 2015 [20 favorites]


I'm just glad nobody ever named programming languages after the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. ("this website is coded in Belushi 3.1 with Gilda CSS")
posted by oneswellfoop at 7:31 PM on October 31, 2015 [2 favorites]


Version 0.1alpha of IgnorantSlut goes public next week, oneswellfoop. I'll make sure to thank you by name in the release notes.

(This looks fascinating, JHarris.)
posted by Mrs. Davros at 7:50 PM on October 31, 2015 [1 favorite]


It's never about snakes, is it.
posted by louche mustachio at 12:41 AM on November 1, 2015


Pfffft. Real geeks program in Firesign, dear friends.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:19 AM on November 1, 2015 [3 favorites]


I only use Cleese++

ObButSeriously - I don't know whether I'll have time to see all of these, but I do love learning about the mechanics of interpreters and compilers. One of my old boss's standard interview questions was to give the interviewee a line of C and get them to hand-compile it to assembler, which I think a fair test for the system-level programmers we needed. But for anyone who's got the intellectual itch to know how stuff actually works, and gets a tingle from the magic of encoding thought and teaching dumb machinery to do clever things with concepts, it's a delight that everything in software is so accessible. Wish it were still universally true for hardware; when I was getting going, you could get detailed data sheets and handbooks for just about anything, but now the stuff under the bonnet of GPUs and cellular chipsets is closely guarded and you frequently can't even get block diagrams out of the vendors.
posted by Devonian at 8:16 AM on November 1, 2015 [3 favorites]


Programming language nerdery has become one of my favorite forms of procrastination lately (besides lurking on MeFi, of course). Thanks for posting this.

Also, I wanted to point out that if you go up to the main course page you will be treated to a picture elegantly summarizing what the course is about.
posted by egregious theorem at 9:32 PM on November 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


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