"Anyway, there's plenty of room for doubt. It might seem easy enough, but computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is."

"Well, enough clowning around. Perl is, in intent, a cleaned up and summarized version of that wonderful semi-natural language known as 'Unix'."

"Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi."

"You have to admit that it's difficult to misplace the Perl sources."

"What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against?"

"Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to pay another nickel. But hey! You only feel 5 cents poorer each time."

"...this does not mean that some of us should not want, in a rather dispassionate sort of way, to put a bullet through csh's head."

"There ain't nothin' in this world that's worth being a snot over."

"Lispers are among the best grads of the Sweep-It-Under-Someone-Else's-Carpet School of Simulated Simplicity. [Was that sufficiently incendiary?]"

"Just don't compare it with a real language, or you'll be unhappy..."

"> (It's sorta like sed, but not. It's sorta like awk, but not. etc.) Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative."

"If you want to see useful Perl examples, we can certainly arrange to have comp.lang.misc flooded with them, but I don't think that would help the advance of civilization."

"If I don't document something, it's usually either for a good reason, or a bad reason. In this case it's a good reason."

"Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs."

"But you have to allow a little for the desire to evangelize when you think you have good news."

": And it goes against the grain of building small tools. Innocent, Your Honor. Perl users build small tools all day long."

"And I don't like doing silly things (except on purpose)."

"... an initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer."

"We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise."

"There are many times when you want it to ignore the rest of the string just like atof() does. Oddly enough, Perl calls atof(). How convenient."

"Sorry. My testing organization is either too small, or too large, depending on how you look at it."

"Perl itself is usually pretty good about telling you what you shouldn't do."

"No, I'm not going to explain it. If you can't figure it out, you didn't want to know anyway..."

"Just don't create a file called -rf."

"I won't mention any names, because I don't want to get sun4's into trouble..."

"It's there as a sop to former Ada programmers."

"I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident."

"In general, if you think something isn't in Perl, try it out, because it usually is."

"If I allowed 'next $label' then I'd also have to allow 'goto $label', and I don't think you really want that..."

"Hey, I had to let awk be better at *something*..."

"Besides, it's good to force C programmers to use the toolbox occasionally."

"Besides, including <std_ice_cubes.h> is a fatal error on machines that don't have it yet. Bad language design, there..."

"All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory..."

"You want it in one line? Does it have to fit in 80 columns?"

"What about WRITING it first and rationalizing it afterwards?"

"Though I'll admit readability suffers slightly..."

"There are still some other things to do, so don't think if I didn't fix your favorite bug that your bug report is in the bit bucket. (It may be, but don't think it."

"There are probably better ways to do that, but it would make the parser more complex. I do, occasionally, struggle feebly against complexity..."

"The only disadvantage I see is that it would force everyone to get Perl. Horrors."

"Real programmers can write assembly code in any language."

"Randal said it would be tough to do in sed. He didn't say he didn't understand sed. Randal understands sed quite well. Which is why he uses Perl."