"Dan Smith: I've tried (in vi) 'g/[a-z]\n[a-z]/s//_/'...but that doesn't cut it. Any ideas? (I take it that it may be a two-pass sort of solution). Larry Wall: In the first pass, install perl."

"It won't be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all..."

"It's documented in The Book, somewhere..."

"It's all magic."

"It is, of course, written in Perl. Translation to C is left as an exercise for the reader."

"I'm sure that that could be indented more readably, but I'm scared of the awk parser."

"I know it's weird, but it does make it easier to write poetry in perl."

"If you want to program in C, program in C. It's a nice language. I use it occasionally..."

"(To someone at New York University) If you consistently take an antagonistic approach, however, people are going to start thinking you're from New York."

"Piet van Oostrum: I find this a nice feature but it is not according to the documentation. Or is it a BUG? Larry Wall: Let's call it an accidental feature."

"I dunno, I dream in Perl sometimes..."

"I don't know if it's what you want, but it's what you get."

"Chip Salzenberg sent me a complete patch to add System V IPC (msg, sem and shm calls), so I added them. If that bothers you, you can always undefine them in config.sh."

"Besides, REAL computers have a rename() system call."

"Because . doesn't match \n. [\0-\377] is the most efficient way to match everything currently. Maybe \e should match everything. And \E would of course match nothing."

"And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is."

"Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something."

"The internet has no government, no constitution, no laws, no rights, no police, no courts. Don't talk about fairness or innocence, and don't talk about what should be done. Instead, talk about what is being done and what will be done by the amorphous unreachable undefinable blob called the internet user base."

"You sound like a man with a vision. Care to pass that bong over this way?"

"Fragmentation is like classful addressing -- an interesting early architectural error that shows how much experimentation was going on while IP was being designed."

"Note that I hold the single-author record for total CERT advisories, proving that in my copious youth I knew how to sling code but not how to manage risk."

"The Internet is not for sissies."

"With usenet gone, we just don't teach our kids entertainment-level hyperbole any more."

"I've been lawsuit-threated [sic] by experts, and i can tell you from that experience, dv8 appears to not be an expert."

"While discussing the merits of djbdns over BIND (2004): Niek: "Bind people don't ack djb points and vice versa." Paul Vixie: i don't ack djb's existence, not merely his 'points.'"

"Isc remains deeply apologetic that prior versions of BIND did not properly catch the configuration error that you appear to have built your business on."

"personally i prefer the MX RR and a stylized name, but i was trying to solve the problem rather than create an industry."

"Usually they finish by whining «but I WANT it!!! and so, I tell them: «So what? Everybody wants something. I want a pony. Get over it."

"I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. ... they carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs."

"I've always been more interested in the future than in the past."

"I've received many honors and I'm grateful for them; but I've already received the highest award I'll ever receive, and that has been the privilege and honor of serving very proudly in the United States Navy."

"[The Computer] was the first machine man built that assisted the power of his brain instead of the strength of his arm."

"They're going right to building them bigger and bigger and faster and faster. They'd do much better to build a system of computers and have them operate in parallel. We'd get much more done, faster. (…) My analogy is that back in the early days of this country, when they moved heavy objects around, they didn't have any Caterpillar tractors and they didn't have any big cranes. They used oxen. And when they got a great, big log on the ground and one ox couldn't move it, they didn't try to grow a bigger ox. They used two oxen."

"It's just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so it's ready when you need it. Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are 'naturals' at computer programming."

"Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems."

"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."

"We're flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question."

"You manage things, you lead people. We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership. It might help if we ran the MBAs out of Washington."

"The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from."

"The most dangerous phrase in the language is 'We've always done it this way!'"."

"Unsourced: One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions."

"Admiral Hopper, ... is the first woman to receive America's highest technology award as an individual. The award recognizes her as a computer pioneer, who spent a half century helping keep America on the leading edge of high technology."

"This saying has been in print already 1957, in Gerald Kershs "Fowler's End", p. 23."

"But Grace, then anyone will be able to write programs!"

"Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, "We've always done it this way." I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise."

"To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge."

"If in doubt – do it."