"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

"...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."

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

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

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

"> (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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how we get there."

"God, at least in the West, is often represented as a man with a flowing beard and sandals... if the Net does have a god, he is probably Jon Postel, a man who matches that description to a T. Mr. Postel's claim to cyber-divinity, besides his appearance, is that he is the chairman and, in effect, the sole member of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, the organization that coordinates almost all Internet addresses."

"He worked quietly for years as keeper of the RFCs and final arbiter in technical matters when consensus couldn’t be reached. Postel believed that decisions he had made in the course of his work over the years had been for the good of the community and that starting a company to profit from those activities would have amounted to a violation of public trust."

"I think they called me the closest thing to a God of the Internet. But at the end, that article wasn’t very complimentary, because the author suggested that I wasn’t doing a very good job, and that I ought to be replaced by a "professional." Of course, there isn’t any "God of the Internet." The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together."

"In general, an implementation must be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior."

"TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."