The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer. Larry Wall More Quotes by Larry Wall More Quotes From Larry Wall People get annoyed when you try to debug them. Larry Wall annoyedtryingpeople For the sake of argument I'll ignore all your fighting words. Larry Wall argumentfightingsake 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. Larry Wall agentsspacethinking Accidental stacks considered harmful. Larry Wall Odd that we think definitions are definitive. Larry Wall definitionsoddthinking Must be a different Larry Wall. There are at least 137 of us in the U.S. Larry Wall larrywalldifferent As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be visually distinct. Larry Wall perlprogrammersreal Well, you can implement a Perl peek() with unpack('P',...). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity. Larry Wall obscuritysecuritywells That being said, I think we should immediately deprecate any string concatenation that combines '19' with '99'. Larry Wall stringsshouldthinking And I don't like doing silly things (except on purpose). Larry Wall silly-thingspurposesilly 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. Larry Wall surprisingwholefirsts 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. Larry Wall stubbornrolestrying 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. Larry Wall road-less-travelledmayjobs Would you trust the linguistic intuitions of someone who has been studying Latin or Greek for three days? Larry Wall intuitiongreeklatin 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. Larry Wall tollsheyfeet The whole history of computers is rampant with cheerleading at best and bigotry at worst. Larry Wall cheerleadingcomputerworst Don't wear rollerskates to a tug-of-war. Larry Wall tug-of-warcomputerwar [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. Larry Wall inputsidesgiving The random quantum fluctuations of my brain are historical accidents that happen to have decided that the concepts of dynamic scoping and lexical scoping are orthogonal and should remain that way. Larry Wall historicalbrainway Real theology is always rather shocking to people who already think they know what they think. I'm still shocked myself. Larry Wall realpeoplethinking