"The random quantum fluctuations of my brain are historical accidents that happen to have decided that the concepts of dynamic scoping and lexical scoping are orthogonal and should remain that way."

"It is my job in life to travel all roads, so that some may take the road less travelled, and others the road more travelled, and all have a pleasant day."

"No prisoner's dilemma here. Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism. More fun, too. Ask any mitochondria."

"Of course, this being Perl, we could always take both approaches."

"It would be possible to optimize some forms of goto, but I haven't bothered."

"If you're going to define a shortcut, then make it the base [sic] darn shortcut you can."

"Call me bored, but don't call me boring."

"Life gets boring, someone invents another necessity, and once again we turn the crank on the screwjack of progress hoping that nobody gets screwed."

"We didn't put in ^^ because then we'd have to keep telling people what it means, and then we'd have to keep telling them why it doesn't short circuit. :-/"

"The following two statements are usually both true: There's not enough documentation. There's too much documentation."

"It's appositival, if it's there. And it doesn't have to be there. And it's really obvious that it's there when it's there."

"I hope I'm not getting so famous that I can't think out load [sic] anymore."

"Well, that's more-or-less what I was saying, though obviously addition is a little more cosmic than the bitwise operators."

"As someone pointed out, you could have an attribute that says 'optimize the heck out of this routine', and your definition of heck would be a parameter to the optimizer."

"Not that I have anything much against redundancy. But I said that already."

"Of course, I reserve the right to make wholly stupid changes to Perl if I think they improve the language."

"That could certainly be done, but I don't want to fall into the Forth trap, where every running Forth implementation is really a different language."

"Randal can write one-liners again. Everyone is happy, and peace spreads over the whole Earth."

"I think you didn't get a reply because you used the terms 'correct' and 'proper', neither of which has much meaning in Perl culture."

"Any false value is gonna be fairly boring in Perl, mathematicians notwithstanding."

"Perl has a long tradition of working around compilers."

"The computer should be doing the hard work. That's what it's paid to do, after all."

"Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future."

"I wouldn't ever write the full sentence myself, but then, I never use goto either."

"Oh, get ahold of yourself. Nobody's proposing that we parse English."

"As with all the other proposals, it's basically just a list of words. You can deal with that..."

"A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy."

"How do Crays and Alphas handle the POSIX problem?"

"You tell it that it's indicative by appending $!. That's why we made $! such a short variable name, after all."

"The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer."

"If you write something wrong enough, I'll be glad to make up a new witticism just for you."

"So far we've managed to avoid turning Perl into APL."

"They can always run stderr through uniq."

"I'd put my money where my mouth is, but my mouth keeps moving."

"I think $[ is more like a coelacanth than a mastadon."

"We question most of the mantras around here periodically, in case you hadn't noticed."

"Tcl long ago fell into the Forth trap, and is now trying desperately to extricate itself (with some help from Sun's marketing department)."

"The whole intent of Perl 5's module system was to encourage the growth of Perl culture rather than the Perl core."

"P.S. Perl's master plan (or what passes for one) is to take over the world like English did. Er, *as* English did..."

"You can prove anything by mentioning another computer language."

"I'm sure a mathematician would claim that 0 and 1 are both very interesting numbers."

"True, it returns ' ' for false, but ' ' is an even more interesting number than 0."

"Anybody want a binary telemetry frame editor written in Perl?"

"Perhaps I'm missing the gene for making enemies."

"Personally, I like to defiantly split my infinitives."

"Real theology is always rather shocking to people who already think they know what they think. I'm still shocked myself."

"At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language."

"I'm serious about thinking through all the possibilities before we settle on anything. All things have the advantages of their disadvantages, and vice versa."

"Sometimes we choose the generalization. Sometimes we don't."

"It's getting harder and harder to think out loud. One of these days someone's gonna go off and kill Thomas a'Becket for me..."