Larry Wall

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"last|perl -pe '$_ x=/(..:.)...(.*)/&&"'$1'"ge$1&&"'$1'"lt$2' That's gonna be tough for Randal to beat..."

"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. &#91;Was that sufficiently incendiary?&#93;"

"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."