Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.

The whole intent of Perl 5's module system was to encourage the growth of Perl culture rather than the Perl core.

So many businesses get worried about looking like they might make a mistake, they become afraid to take any risk.

Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

You can prematurely optimize maintainability, flexibility, security, and robustness just like you can performance.

The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'

I look to see what things I enjoy doing and just try to figure out how to spend my time doing things that I enjoy.

The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.

I generally think if you do good things for people in the world, that comes back and you benefit from it over time.

I actually think people generally have an awareness and feel like, 'Wow, these networks have a lot of information.'

If you consistently take an antagonistic approach, however, people are going to start thinking you're from New York.

I view the JVM as just another architecture that Perl ought to be ported to. (That, and the Underwood typewriter...)

I think the best kind of virality is a product that people like so much that they just want to tell people about it.

A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.

I try not to confuse roles and traits in my own life. Being the Perl god is a role. Being a stubborn cuss is a trait.

People think innovation is just having a good idea but a lot of it is just moving quickly and trying a lot of things.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

As abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice.

When you read the history of the human family, it slowly comes to you that all the world's oceans once fell as tears.

Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer.

Sometimes, the elegant implementation is just a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function.

I'm never satisfied because I've been always interested in too many things and I always want to do everything at once.

Younger hackers are hard to classify. They're probably just as diverse as the old hackers are. We're all over the map.

VR is a very intense visual experience and having the most powerful PC is the only way to deliver certain experiences.

This job of playing God is a little too big for me. Nevertheless, someone has to do it, so I'll try my best to fake it.

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.

Well, you can implement a Perl peek() with unpack('P',...). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity.

Real theology is always rather shocking to people who already think they know what they think. I'm still shocked myself.

The world has become a larger place. The universe has been expanding, and Perl's been expanding along with the universe.

When you want to change things, you can't please everyone. If you do please everyone, you aren't making enough progress.

Since SpaceX's very beginnings, they have talked about recovering and reusing at least the first stages of their rockets.

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.

Don't discount yourself, no matter what you're doing. Everyone has a unique perspective that they can bring to the world.

Google, I think, in some ways, is more competitive and certainly is trying to build their own little version of Facebook.

Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

I've never been one of those programmers that works effectively on short amounts of sleep. I've always needed eight hours.

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.

The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.

A lot of times, I run a thought experiment: 'If I were not at Facebook, what would I be doing to make the world more open?'

I've never used Sybase in my life. How would I make an intelligent decision about this versus that with a Sybase extension?

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?

The companies that work are the ones that people really care about and have a vision for the world so do something you like.

People don't care about what someone says about you in a movie--or even what you say, right? They care about what you build.

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.

Facebook is in a very different place than Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft. We are trying to build a community.

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

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

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