All Quotes

"Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality..."

"Let us be charitable, and call it a misleading feature"

"Perl programming is an *empirical* science!"

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"> (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."

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

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

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

"...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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

"Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in."

"I don't like your I-can-use-anything-as-an-adjective attitude."

"I want to see people using Perl to glue things together creatively, not just technically but also socially."

"The whole history of computers is rampant with cheerleading at best and bigotry at worst."

"If someone stinks, view it as a reason to help them, not a reason to avoid them."

"As usual, I'm overstating the case to knock a few neurons loose, but the truth is usually somewhere in the muddle, uh, middle."

"Odd that we think definitions are definitive."

": But for some things, Perl just isn't the optimal choice. (yet)"

"I don't like this official/unofficial distinction. It sound, er, officious."

"Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them."

"Just as eunuchs will never know aesthetics as applied to the selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is reasoned or defined."

"Absolute relativism, which is neither more nor less than skepticism, in the most modern sense of the term, is the supreme triumph of the reasoning reason."

"La verdadera ciencia enseña, por encima de todo, a dudar y a ser ignorante. (True science teaches, above all, to doubt and be ignorant.)"

"Feeling does not succeed in converting consolation into truth, nor does reason succeed in converting truth into consolation."

"To believe in God is to yearn for His existence and, furthermore, it is to act as if He did exist."

"To know something is to make this something that I know myself; but to avail myself of it, to dominate it, it has to remain distinct from myself."

"Philosophy and religion are enemies, and because they are enemies they have need of one another. There is no religion without some philosophical basis, no philosophy without roots in religion. … the attacks which are directed against religion from a presumed scientific or philosophical point of view are merely attacks from another but opposing religious point of view."

"To all this, someone is sure to object that life ought to subject itself to reason, to which we will reply that nobody ought to do what he is unable to do, and life cannot subject itself to reason. "Ought, therefore can," some Kantian will retort. To which we shall demur: "Cannot, therefore ought not." And life cannot submit itself to reason, because the end of life is living and not understanding."

"In the most secret chamber of the spirit of him who believes himself convinced that death puts an end to his personal consciousness, his memory, for ever, and all unknown to him perhaps, there lurks a shadow, a vague shadow, a shadow of uncertainty, and while he says within himself, "Well, let us live this life that passes away, for there is no other!" the silence of this secret chamber speaks to him and murmurs, "Who knows!... " These voices are like the humming of a mosquito when the south-west wind roars through the trees in the wood; we cannot distinguish this faint humming, yet nevertheless, merged in the clamor of the storm, it reaches the ear."