Back then, the limits of my vision were the Unix operating system. I never thought about Windows or Mac.
Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.
For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.
Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.
I am not a sort of person who wants to run a company.
I don't think it's worth washing hogs over.
I guess if you want to hire experts, you want to make sure they're experts. Certification is useful for that.
I have a list of things I don't like. That's part of the reason we are doing Perl 6.
I still drive my 1977 Honda Accord. The paint is almost all worn off. It's still running.
I take more of the approach of letting people yell at each other, If people have enough discussion, people will point out why each other's idea is stupid.
I take time to watch anime. I don't know whether I'm allowed to, but I do it anyway.
I talked about becoming stupid, but I've always been stupid. Fortunately I've been just smart enough to realize that I'm stupid.
I think computer science, by and large, is still stuck in the Modern age.
I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.
I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.
I think that the things that are infrastructure like roads, electric lines, should stay free, and you pay for the electricity, the gas.
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.
I think the younger programmers can afford to have a larger vision.
I think writing should not just convey facts, but also be another work of art.
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.
I wrote my own license, but I didn't want to offend the free software, the GPL people.
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.
I'm never satisfied because I've been always interested in too many things and I always want to do everything at once.
I'm not just trying to write computer programs, but to change the culture around me for a better one, whether it's writing Perl or any of the other programs I've written.
If any ideology is so serious that you can't have fun while you're doing it, it's probably too serious.
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.
In a programming language, you have to clear things ahead of time. That works out very well to encourage people to put at least some documentation.
In the area of computer languages, there are just a certain number of people who are interested in developing their own. You can't stop them, they're just going to do it anyway.
It really depends on whether you would like to learn a smaller language and fight with it all the time, or learn a slightly larger language and have more fun.
It's important in the long run to have multiple languages, multiple operating systems, and if you don't have that competition, then we don't survive.
Just because you're trying to help, it doesn't mean you actually help. But our hearts are in the right place.
Many days I don't write any code at all, and some days I spend all day writing code.
My approach to language design has always been that people should learn just enough of the languages to get their jobs done.
My family watches a lot of anime.
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.
People don't want to have to use Perl plus other things.
Perl needs to be run on every architecture.
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.
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.
Programmers can be lazy.
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.
Some of modern engineering is necessary to good art. But I think of myself is a cultural artist.
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.
The computer crowd had their insurance that their rights would not be taken away, and the companies had some insurance, and everyone was happy.
The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.
The problems that I really like to solve are our cultural problems.
The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.
The way I work is like the Supreme Court. All the lawyers prepare for their defenses for one side or the other, and then they present those. I'm the dictator.
The whole progress is driven in a Darwinian sense. You have variations of ideas, and some of them work better than others, and then those survive and continue on.
The world has become a larger place. The universe has been expanding, and Perl's been expanding along with the universe.
There are many people who love Perl dearly and would want to see it advanced whether or not I was part of it.
There are things that are difficult to decide over the Internet.
There has to be a period of time which is sort of deconstruction against the Modern. But it recovers and comes back so you can mix together the Modern, the Romantic, the Classical and the Baroque, however you want to classify the history.
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.
To be a good artist, you have to serve the work of art and allow it to be what it is supposed to be.
Until now, the process of the design of Perl has been evolutionary. It's been done by prototype and modification.
We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise.
We are so Post-Modern that we don't realize how Post-Modern we are anymore.
We did a lot of small projects and gave them away, because if you do a large project the company notices it, and you're in trouble.
What you'll need most is courage. It is not an easy path that you've set your foot upon.
When I announced the development of Perl 6, I said it was going to be a community design. I designed Perl, myself. It's limited by my own brain power. So I wanted Perl 6 to be a community design.
When you meet somebody across the net, you can be friends with them, but until you meet face to face, it's difficult to really understand how other people think.
With certification, you have to be learning the whole language. Some people feel more comfortable that way.
You have the Java camp, which duplicated an awful lot of stuff, then you have Microsoft coming out with C#, they're trying to do the same thing. That makes duplicated work for us, because we want to target all of those architectures.
Younger hackers are hard to classify. They're probably just as diverse as the old hackers are. We're all over the map.
At present cats have more purchasing power and influence than the poor of this planet. Accidents of geography and colonial history should no longer determine who gets the fish.
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