Frasi di Larry Wall

“Beauty? What's that?”

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

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

“My arthritic pinkies are already starting to ache just thinking about ||||=.”

“One operator is no big deal. That can be fixed in a jiffy.”

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

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

“Chip Salzenberg sent me a complete patch to add System V IPC (msg, sem and shm calls), so I added them. If that bothers you, you can always undefine them in config. sh.”

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

“Call me bored, but don't call me boring.”

“So I'm thinking about??, or!!, or //, or \\, or whatever. But I think I like?? the best so far. Or the least worst.”

“I dunno. Perhaps you should be happy that I have a policy of refraining from grumbling about handicapped operating systems.”

“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?”

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

“tt>if (rsfp = mypopen('/bin/mail root','w')) { /* heh, heh */</tt”

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

“I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident.”

“That is a known bug in 5.00550. Either an upgrade or a downgrade will fix it.”

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

“If there's a particular problem that Perl is trying to solve, it's the basic fact that all programming languages suck. Sort of the concept of original sin, applied to programming languages.”

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

“… Then you start building things like the Berlin wall to keep people inside your community. In anthropological terms, that's tribalism. A tribal Perl programmer might say, "If you leave the Perl tribe to go and join the Python tribe, we will hunt you down, cook you, and eat you." Or if you join the Ruby tribe, you will explode. By and large, I am not in favor of tribalism. Except for my tribe, of course.”

“It's there as a sop to former Ada programmers.”

“On the plus side, it's a lot easier in general to find /usr/include than cpp.”

“So please don't think I have a 'down' on the MVS people. I'm just pulling off their arms to beat other people over the head with.”

“That should probably be written: no!@#$%^&*:@! semicolon”

“Just don't create a file called -rf.”

“[ End of diatribe. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming…]”

“And C was good at something I like to call manipulexity, that is the manipulation of complex things. While shell was good at something else which I call whipuptitude, the aptitude for whipping things up.”