Slashdot Mirror
Henry's Python Programming Guide
An anonymous reader writes "Seems like someone else has put up another Python programming guide, although this one seems to be a little easier to get through. From the article: 'My name is Henry the Adequate, and I am a Python programming Guru. I know all of their movies, and their TV shows, and can quote the dead parrot sketch in my sleep. In fact I do quote it in my sleep. That may explain why I am single, although it could also have something to do with the flamethrower. Naturally many old-timers want to know what this new-fangled Python thing is all about. "Henry," they say, "What is this new-fangled Python thing all about?" See what i mean? So, here, at last, is the article you have all been waiting for...'"
That's all I can say... WTF. Or perhaps WTFITDOS (WTF Is This Doing On Slashdot)?
John.
Is it just me or is that article summary complete and utter nonsense?
Ok, it was kinda nice, but let's get this out of the way: Why the lucky stiff's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby is funnier.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
See the title and think "Who is Henry Python and what does he know about programing"?
I need to get more sleep.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
It's funny... laugh.
Where's the contigency plan if it isn't, oh mighty Slashdot? Should I consult the SlashCode? Will it be funnier if I subscribe? HELP ME!
WHAT DO I DO?
Too silly, far too silly...
I wonder why the slashdot category for this story says "Programming". Are the "Henry my brother-in-law needs some page hits" category slots already full?
Front-pager? Ofcourse.
I'm now a python expert. Expect to be earning big $$$ real soon now.
One wonders if the said 'old-timers' were female. If so this is a rather poor pickup line.
I mean, how many women do you know who would be interested in Henry the Adequate's Python?
It sounded like this guy was trying to write using stream of consciousness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_of_consciousn
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
This parrot really is dead.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
How did this make it to /. ?
An anonymous reader writes
Slashdot editors spelled 'Henry' way wrong.
I remember this from when it didn't make it on digg....
Okay...why does this guy have enough bandwidth to support Slashdot?
And why do the editors find this hilarious enough to put on the front page?
I feel like the brunt of an in-joke played on us by this Henry guy and the Slashdot editors.
Maybe Henry's made of money and this is a bizarre form of Slashvertisement.
He can afford the bandwidth, after all.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Agreed, what a waste of time. http://www.python.org/ would have been a lot more useful, albeit already known by most.
To summorize:
if you want to waste time:
click on link in article
else:
skip to next slashdot article and make believe this one does not exist
Henry's Python Programming Guide isn't nearly as funny as Monty's.
(wait for it...) *rim hat*
Where are these guys when you need them?
I was actually looking forward to reading a quick introduction on Python as I primarily use C/C++ and I thought, "Hey, if it's on the front page of slashdot, then it's probably a decent article." Instead, I found this craptastic waste of time that doesn't even approach funny. It's just a bunch of really cheesy and way too obvious "jokes." Anyway, I don't mean to put down the author so much as whoever approved this story getting on the front page of slashdot. You guys are better than this. :)
Another person who thinks Larry Wall is so funny they need to copy his chirpy, irritating, gee-I'm-smart-but-I'm-a-laff style?? The world doesn't need another one.
The thing about Monty Python was that it was really really silly but you needed a PhD in philosophy, history and linguistics to get all the jokes. The Python language is sort of like that. Anyone can get it at a certain level but it's a lot deeper if you need it to be.
Anyway, Towel Day is coming up and it's a chance to honour the life of Douglas Adams.
http://www.towelday.kojv.net/
My 5 yr old nephew told me a joke funnier than ANYTHING in that article, this weekend.
What's red and barks?
A retarded apple.
Yes, THAT is more rewarding than reading the article.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Need Spamalot Tickets?
Same Tickets as Other Sites Just Much Lower Prices -No Service Fee's
I noticed this lone advert on the page, can anyone tell me, is "Spamalot" anything like "Mixalot" ? I liked Monster Mac.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
The signal/noise ratio is way too low for me to spend my time reading this. It can be a good idea to have humorous bits in a tutorial or guide, to keep the reader engaged. In this case though, the actual information is getting lost in a sea of meaningless chatter.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
The author is trying to be funny and informative at that same time. The modivation behind this is that Python "the programming language" is named after "Monty Python's Flying Circus". While Monty Python my be funny it doesn't have anything to do with the programming language other than being its name sake. Python "the language" is itself worth looking into as it is a very flexible language that is extremely portable. My master thesis was written entirely in python. While I'm a fan of both Pythons I never mix the two as logic and humor are not good bed fellows. Have a nice day.
We've got a lot of Python and Jython here at work. Turns out it was coded a few years ago by some C++ coders who were asked to work with Java and just couldn't comprehend it and therefore wrote in Jython. Their Java and Jython code is beyond horrific. Currently removing and replacing with better code.
a bit offtopic, but if i think this story is funny, do i tag it !notfunny?
Chuck Norris invented Python. In his sleep. When he was two.
-- "Mathematics is music for the mind, and Music is Mathematics for the Soul. - J.S. Bach"
Tagged as: "[+] notfunny, python, spam, useless, wtf (tagging beta)"
As someone fairly new to computer programming, I've been reading through a lot of tutorials and things of that nature. I'm not in any particular class or anything like that, I'm just interested in programming. I, for one, am quite tired of reading things that try to be funny and make me laugh. This article is moronic and offends me as someone who was hoping that slashdot had posted a good source for learning Python. I find myself wondering if Slashdot had any particular reason for posting this or if the editors just decided not to read through submissions for a while.
... actual Python gurus are off at a sprint in Iceland for a week of hacking that started yesterday.
In fact, my biggest struggle to get into it was that it was too much like pseudocode in flexibility. If you cannot look at Python, as a programmer, and figure out what half of it is doing instantly, something is wrong with you. It's the closest I've ever seen to writing an algorithm in English and executing it in a way that wasn't in near plain English like AppleScript.
If they wanted to post something funny about python, instead of this nonsense, they could've just posted that:
http://www.python.org/doc/Humor.html
I can't get the embedded python to work in Word.
The dead parrot trick isn't working?
Anyone know how to activate the Word embedded python?
How this article is posted minutes after another article where a portion of the article is copied verbatim in the story summary.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
... is remotely funny and even that should never have lasted the author of TFA to actually get to the end of writing it. If people didn't think this was funny because they didn't like Python jokes, spam or trout, that would have been ok. But it's got nothing to do with Python humour in the first place...
And now, for something completely different, I'd say.
Can we get this article retitled?
Maybe something like "Henry Python and the blog of shame"?
-- Terry
Python has exception handling. Which means when those guys from the far east take exception, it can handle it.
So did you guys notice the Amazon link there.... I am guessing someone wanted or made a huge load of $$$
How did this even get considered for making /. ?
Unfunny, uninteresting, uninformative,...
Just painful to look at, actually.
This loser may not even make 100 comments befoe it leaves the frontpage!
Let's up the dose of his meds, they're not working very well. He should go back to writing Sesame Street books.
This reads like an Uncyclopedia article that didn't survive long before falling victim to VFD.
I am personally offended that none of my submissions ever made it onto Slashdot (even given that they weren't the typicaly "Microsoft Sucks, Open Source Rules" fare) and this vile piece of non-information did.
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
no, seriously it's a good laugh and i didn't mind the five minutes i spent reading the article.
but what's it doing on slashdot frontpage? i would probably have received in somebody's *geeky* forward ;)
You people are all very sad.
For some reason, I knew next to nothing about Python before reading that article. Now I know all the key aspects of the language, and that's more than enough information to guide a proper programmer in his choice of a language for a particular project, or for pleasure learning. Then he starts wading through tutorials and documentation.
Admittedly, I could have found out at least as much from Wikipedia or straight from python.org (which is also linked in the article, N.B.), without all the jokes besides. Well help me God, I had five minutes of fun by reading someone's mashup of a snake's programming language versus John Cleese and friends. How awful !
Oh, and the thing about it being on the front page of Slashdot ? Last I checked, this site was a tech blog . "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." is a f*cking humorous slogan -- and an elaborate programming + Monty Python joke is worthy of any nerd, anyway. Go somewhere else for your stuck-up copyedited journalism, this is CmdrTaco's fun place, for sh*t's sake !
You guys are all just sad. Except those who are merry enough to have disregarded this comment, of course. I'm hoping the nastier mods will fall in that second category. Oh wait...
So informative! I never realized that after Lifer of Brian, the Holy grail, etc. they had actually created a whole programming language.
Being a long time fan, I will *immediatly* start studying.
And laughing.
wink-wink;
nudge-nudge;
RETURN 0;
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
You know, you read a title like "Python Programming Guide", and you expect a lenghty document detailing a programming languge. Maybe a page or two (or even several hundred for some really wacky edge cases), possibly the product of LaTeX2HTML, or at the very least with a table of contents. And you become excited, thinking you might perhaps learn something about Python! And then you make the mistake of clicking on the link you just read, and become drastically disappointed.
In all honesty, this guys witty banter, if it can even be called that, is longer than his expose of the language. The Wikipedia article is roughly 10 times as long, and doesn't actually expose any of the underpinnings of the languge; hell, the Wikipeida disambiguation page is almost longer than this man's opus.
"Henry The Woefully Inadequate" at best, "Henry The Lame" at worst. Get this article back on Digg where it belongs.
"My heart is in the work." - Andrew Carnegie
Just this morning, as I was perusing through Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit, a thought occurred to me that even though there is far greater variety and features on the latter sites, I'm still a loyal fan of /. (mostly) for it's editors. Even for their shortcomings - bad grammer, duplicate posts - the quality of their filter is the reason why I continue coming here... until this post! Give me a break, slashdot. " Windows Media Player 11 and Urge", "Biggest Obstacle of Nuclear Fusion Overcome?", and "Wired Releases Full Text of AT&T NSA Document" are all quality article submissions, so when I thgouht I was going to get a great introduction to Python, being a PHP developer, I was intrigued and quite pleased to click the link. Now I'm frustrated just enough to take the 30 seconds to make this post.
Heres a quick script that i think the shlashdot moderators should follow...
if rubish(story)
reject();
else
checkagain();
End
scuttle monkey you asshat, trying reading TFA before you post it.
Don't mean any offense or anything, but Henry is a terribly funny name. Nobody can take a technical article seriously if it was written by a guy called Henry. I remember back in school we were learning all about the wonderful world of physics units, and there was one we just couldn't swallow: you guessed it.
The Henry.
We had Newtons and Farads, Ohms and Volts. But nobody imagined we could have Henrys.
We were all dumbstruck for days.
Dunno, just thought I'd share that.
A programming guide by Harry Potter!!!
... who initially read the headline as "Monty Python's Programming Guide"?
Time to get some sleep.
It doesn't even belong in the "It's funny, laugh" section, since it completely fails at coming off as even remotely funny
I think you may be confusing an alleged lack of comedy value in the article with the wholesale inability of Americans to grasp anything remotely humorous unless it contains the word "beaver" in it.
olo@laptopola:~$ python
Python 2.4.3 (#2, Apr 27 2006, 14:43:58)
[GCC 4.0.3 (Ubuntu 4.0.3-1ubuntu5)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> print "Lrg nabgure Clguba Theh".decode('rot13')
what was so hard about dive into python?
Thank God for all the comments about "not funny" --I thought my sense of humor was broken.
It had so much potential--it was...actually, it didn't have any potential. I should've known better when I saw the "Kubrick" theme.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Yay, i've just started to learn a bit of Python, every little helps... :-)
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
This is a joke, only a joke! I'm surprised more people on /. haven't seen this guy before.
I found his Linux reviews funnier.
I imagine this is what happens when a geek get's high on something.
http://weblog.henrytheadequate.com/?cat=5
"Also, if you have any version of Microsoft Windows on the computer it's best to choose the option to wipe the entire drive. This is because the viral nature of Windows will cause it to leak over onto the Fedora partition. That would be very dangerous, and might even result in an explosion, or a fire. Fire is beautiful. I love fire.... Anyway..." -Henry
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