Larry Wall

"(To the extent that anyone but a Prolog programmer can understand \X totally. (And to the extent that a Prolog programmer can understand 'cut'.)"

"Wow, I'm being shot at from both sides. That means I *must* be right."

"You don't have to wait--you can have it in 5.004_54 or so."

"There's something to be said for returning the whole syntax tree."

"It's not really a rule--it's more like a trend."

"Double *sigh*. _04 is going onto thousands of CDs even as we speak, so to speak."

"The code also assumes that it's difficult to misspell 'a' or 'b'."

"Well, hey, let's just make everything into a closure, and then we'll have our general garbage collector, installed by 'use less memory'."

"People who understand context would be steamed to have someone else dictating how they can call it."

"For the sake of argument I'll ignore all your fighting words."

"Think of prototypes as a funny markup language--the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine."

"The way these things go, there are probably 6 or 8 kludgey ways to do it, and a better way that involves rethinking something that hasn't been rethunk yet."

"Beauty? What's that?"

"I'm afraid my gut level reaction is basically, proceed is cute, but cute doesn't cut it in the emergency room."

"I suppose one could claim that an undocumented feature has no semantics. :-("

"Yes, we have consensus that we need 64 bit support."

": - cut in regexps I don't think we reached consensus on that. We're still backtracking..."

"Boss: You forgot to assign the result of your map! Hacker: Dang, I'm always forgetting my assignations... Boss: And what's that 'goto' doing there?!? Hacker: Er, I guess my finger slipped when I was typing 'getservbyport'... Boss: Ah well, accidents will happen. Maybe we should have picked APL."

"Perhaps they will have to outlaw sending random lists of words. fee fie foe foo"

"Hey, if pi == 3, and three == 0, does that make pi == 0?"

"(Never thought I'd be telling Malcolm and Ilya the same thing..."

"And other operators aren't so special syntactically, but weird in other ways, like 'scalar', and 'goto'."

"Portability should be the default."

"If this were Ada, I suppose we'd just constant fold 1/0 into die 'Illegal division by zero"

"Are you perchance running on a 64-bit machine?"

"Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose."

"There's some entertainment value in watching people juggle nitroglycerin."

"Reserve your abuse for your true friends."

"Er, Tom, I hate to be the one to point this out, but your fix list is starting to resemble a feature list. You must be human or something."

"It's hard to tune heavily tuned code."

"Perl will always provide the null."

"It's easy to solve the halting problem with a shotgun."

"Well, I think Perl should run faster than C."

"To Perl, or not to Perl, that is the kvetching."

"I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'."

"Well, you know, Hubbard had a bunch of people sworn to commit suicide when he died. So of course he never officially died..."

"Even the White House has a press agent."

"That's a valid argument. I just don't think it's valid enough."

"Perl should remain fast and intuitive (to the extent that it is :-)"

"I would estimate that the number of programs it breaks in the world will be less than 10. As long as one of those 10 isn't CGI.pm, we're probably okay."

"Just put in another goto, and then it'll be readable."

"I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?"

"Y'know, there are other possibilities if we assume that filenames are UTF-8...yikes...wait, put down that meat cleaver! Aieeee!!!"

"print rand rand rand 1, '\n'; # interesting distribution"

": I could understand principles of Perl source in 2-3 days [. . .] Gee, it took me about eleven years."

"There's often more than one correct thing. There's often more than one right thing. There's often more than one obvious thing."

"I don't believe I've ever cuddled my elses."

"I've always maintained a cordial dislike for indent, because it's usually right."

"I'd make people say 'use Fork;' if I thought I could get away with it."

"The way I see it, if you declare something portable, you'll always be wrong, and if you declare it non-portable, you'll always be right."