Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.
I'm just paid to do whatever I want to do. Some of the time it's development, and some of the time it's just goofing off.
Well, you know, Hubbard had a bunch of people sworn to commit suicide when he died. So of course he never officially died.
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.
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?
True greatness is measured by how much freedom you give to others, not by how much you can coerce others to do what you want.
You know, I've got my hands in 30 or 40 different pots simultaneously and so I have a little bit of all of that where I work.
Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.
There's often more than one correct thing. There's often more than one right thing. There's often more than one obvious thing.
Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.
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.
And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is.
The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other.
I talked about becoming stupid, but I've always been stupid. Fortunately I've been just smart enough to realize that I'm stupid.
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.
If you're a large corporation, you can afford to pay the money to register patents, but if you're an individual like me, you can't.
The camel has evolved to be relatively self-sufficient. On the other hand, the camel has not evolved to smell good. Neither has Perl.
Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context.
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.
To ordinary folks, conversion is not always automatic. It's something that may or may not require explicit assistance. See Billy Graham.
Well, hey, let's just make everything into a closure, and then we'll have our general garbage collector, installed by 'use less memory'.
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.
I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it.
And besides, if Perl really takes off in the Windows space, I think the rest of us would just as soon have a double-agent within ActiveState.
The trouble with being quoted a lot is that it makes other people think you're quoting yourself when in fact you're merely repeating yourself.
You can never entirely stop being what you once were. That's why it's important to be the right person today, and not put it off till tomorrow.
As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language.
The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.
There is, however, a strange, musty smell in the air that reminds me of something...hmm...yes...I've got it...there's a VMS nearby, or I'm a Blit.
Life gets boring, someone invents another necessity, and once again we turn the crank on the screwjack of progress hoping that nobody gets screwed.
The problem with using C++ ... is that there's already a strong tendency in the language to require you to know everything before you can do anything.
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.
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.
The court finds everyone to be in contempt (including himself :-), and orders everyone sentenced to five years hard labor. (Working on Perl, of course.)
It is my job in life to travel all roads, so that some may take the road less travelled, and others the road more travelled, and all have a pleasant day.
We don't have enough parallel universes to allow all uses of all junction types - in the absence of quantum computing the combinatorics are not in our favor.
Somebody out there is going to do something that's far more surprising than anything that I would do. I was surprised by the whole web thing in the first place.
One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.
Even if you aren't in doubt, consider the mental welfare of the person who has to maintain the code after you, and who will probably put parens in the wrong place.
There is no schedule. We are all volunteers, so we get it done when we get it done. Perl 5 still works fine, and we plan to take the right amount of time on Perl 6.
Perl doesn't have an infatuation with enforced privacy. It would prefer that you stayed out of its living room because you weren't invited, not because it has a shotgun
But the possibility of abuse may be a good reason for leaving capabilities out of other computer languages, it's not a good reason for leaving capabilities out of Perl.
[Boxed] Multiple bouncing balls in a box are a metaphor for community. Notice how the escaping balls explode. This is what happens to people who move from Perl to Ruby.
As someone pointed out, you could have an attribute that says 'optimize the heck out of this routine', and your definition of heck would be a parameter to the optimizer.
The only reason [not to use] perl is that some sysadmins don't allow software that they didn't pay for. By all means, let them send me money if it makes them feel better.
Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned the language, it's more expressive.
[Perl] gives you the STDERR filehandle so that your program can make snide comments off to the side while it transforms (or attempts to transform) your input into your output.
Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.
I want people to use Perl. I want to be a positive ingredient of the world and make my American history. So, whatever it takes to give away my software and get it used, that's great.
But I know what's important to me, and what isn't. And I think I know what people can get used to, and what they can even learn to like. (It just takes some people longer than others. :-)