I think I’m likely to be certified before Perl is...
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.
A lazy person will try to always find some way to do something; they’ll always be looking for ways of doing something faster, more efficiently, and if you really want to control the world, that’s a really sort of hubristic notion – excessive pride, the thing that Zeus zaps you for having.
The whole history of computers is rampant with cheerleading at best and bigotry at worst.
Computer programming is really a lot like writing a recipe. If you’ve read a recipe, you know what the structure of a recipe is, it’s got some things up at the top that are your ingredients, and below that, the directions for how to deal with those ingredients.
At many levels, Perl is a ‘diagonal’ language.
Natural languages generally are not designed by humans, they’re just designed by the participants and you say something new and somebody else says, “Oh, that’s a cool way to say it,” and the next thing you know, everyone is saying it because it’s shiny.
Life gets boring, someone invents another necessity, and once again we turn the crank on the screwjack of progress hoping that nobody gets screwed.
People get annoyed when you try to debug them.
I’m a great believer in visual distinctions.
We can debug relationships, but it’s always good policy to consider the people themselves to be features. People get annoyed when you try to debug them.
Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
You can’t have filenames longer than 14 chars. You can’t even think about them!
All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory...
Information wants to be useful.
Laziness is a programmer’s main virtue.
A Perl program is correct if it gets the job done before your boss fires you.
There’s many scripting languages in the world, Perl is a little bit special because it is based more on some ideas from the way natural languages work.
The camel has evolved to be relatively self-sufficient. On the other hand, the camel has not evolved to smell good. Neither has Perl.