"But I know what's important to me, and what isn't. And I think I know what people can get used to, and what they can even learn to like. (It just takes some people longer than others. :-)"

"Would you trust the linguistic intuitions of someone who has been studying Latin or Greek for three days?"

"In Clintonese, that would be 'You are free to infer that I was saying that.'"

"One operator is no big deal. That can be fixed in a jiffy."

"So I'm thinking about ??, or !!, or //, or \\, or whatever. But I think I like ?? the best so far. Or the least worst."

"If this were Ada, we'd simply doc it as 'erroneous'."

"That which hits the fan tends to get flung in all directions."

"Psychotics are consistently inconsistent. The essence of sanity is to be inconsistently inconsistent."

"On the plus side, it's a lot easier in general to find /usr/include than cpp."

"I dunno. Perhaps you should be happy that I have a policy of refraining from grumbling about handicapped operating systems."

"Well, sure, I explicitly mentioned 'vtables' last time I brought this up. But a single pointer is fairly paltry, as tables go."

": What do people think? What, do people think?"

"It's, uh, pseudo code. Yeah, that's the ticket... [...] And 'unicode' is pseudo code for $encoding."

"So please don't think I have a 'down' on the MVS people. I'm just pulling off their arms to beat other people over the head with."

"I view the JVM as just another architecture that Perl ought to be ported to. (That, and the Underwood typewriter...)"

"I note that the Python folks still think they like JPython. I wonder how long that will last?"

"The court finds everyone to be in contempt (including himself :-), and orders everyone sentenced to five years hard labor. (Working on Perl, of course.)"

"And besides, if Perl really takes off in the Windows space, I think the rest of us would just as soon have a double-agent within ActiveState."

"Maybe we should take a clue from FTP and put in an option like 'print hash marks on every 1024 iterations'."

": Why Bible quotes exclusively? What happened to the Eastern religions?<BR> I'm still working on the Unicode mods."

"Perhaps you should compile your Perl with long doubles one of these megaseconds."

"The way I see it, if you declare something portable, you'll always be wrong, and if you declare it non-portable, you'll always be right."

"I'd make people say 'use Fork;' if I thought I could get away with it."

"I've always maintained a cordial dislike for indent, because it's usually right."

"I don't believe I've ever cuddled my elses."

"There's often more than one correct thing. There's often more than one right thing. There's often more than one obvious thing."

": I could understand principles of Perl source in 2-3 days [. . .] Gee, it took me about eleven years."

"print rand rand rand 1, '\n'; # interesting distribution"

"Y'know, there are other possibilities if we assume that filenames are UTF-8...yikes...wait, put down that meat cleaver! Aieeee!!!"

"I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?"

"Just put in another goto, and then it'll be readable."

"I would estimate that the number of programs it breaks in the world will be less than 10. As long as one of those 10 isn't CGI.pm, we're probably okay."

"Perl should remain fast and intuitive (to the extent that it is :-)"

"That's a valid argument. I just don't think it's valid enough."

"Even the White House has a press agent."

"Well, you know, Hubbard had a bunch of people sworn to commit suicide when he died. So of course he never officially died..."

"I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'."

"To Perl, or not to Perl, that is the kvetching."

"Well, I think Perl should run faster than C."

"It's easy to solve the halting problem with a shotgun."

"Perl will always provide the null."

"It's hard to tune heavily tuned code."

"Er, Tom, I hate to be the one to point this out, but your fix list is starting to resemble a feature list. You must be human or something."

"Reserve your abuse for your true friends."

"There's some entertainment value in watching people juggle nitroglycerin."

"Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose."

"Are you perchance running on a 64-bit machine?"

"If this were Ada, I suppose we'd just constant fold 1/0 into die 'Illegal division by zero"

"Portability should be the default."

"And other operators aren't so special syntactically, but weird in other ways, like 'scalar', and 'goto'."