Larry Wall

"'Course, that doesn't work when 'a' contains parentheses."

"I was trying not to mention backtracking. Which, of course, means that yours is 'righter' than mine, in a theoretical sense."

"(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."

"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'."

"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."

"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."

"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..."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"They can always run stderr through uniq."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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. :-/"

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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