A system needs to be alive and workable even when other people than the first enthusiasts start using it. Reinvention and revolution are enthusiast stuff. Invention and evolution are engineering.

It's not that Perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done.

Norway did not even have a revolution at the time the rest of Europe was busy figuring out human rights and stuff, because we were busy fighting over how to spell it.

We have no mom-and-pop oil rigs in Norway.

Part of any serious QA is removing Perl code the same way you go over a dilapidated building you inherit to remove chewing gum and duct tape and fix whatever was kept together for real.

it's just that in C++ and the like, you don't trust anybody, and in CLOS you basically trust everybody. The practical result is that thieves and bums use C++ and nice people use CLOS.

I guess there are some things that are so gross you just have to forget, or it'll destroy something within you. Perl is the first such thing I have known.

That's why the smartest companies use Common Lisp, but lie about it so all their competitors think Lisp is slow and C++ is fast.

Life is hard, and then you die.

Well, take it from an old hand: the only reason it would be easier to program in C is that you can't easily express complex problems in C, so you don't.

Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary.

I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often strong feelings don't seem to carry any message of action.

The thing we tell of can never be found be seeking, yet only seekers find it.

Please. If you were mostly dead in the middle of the road I'd obviously stop. And then I'd watch you die." Kate to Will

The greatest and most important problems of life cannot be solved. They can only be outgrown.

If liberty with law is fire on the hearth, liberty without law is fire on the floor.

I didn’t care…about heroes who could read minds or walk through walls or do magic. The heroes I liked had courage and knew more real stuff than those who opposed them.

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.

I don't want the director to have to make any decisions except to say "action" and "cut."

Some people think it's wrong, being single isn't right. But if you hurt the right person, you'll be wrong all your life.

Continue to express your dissent and your needs, but remember to remain civilized, for you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrified in the turbulence of change.