86 Perl Quotes

I want to see people using Perl to glue things together creatively, not just technically but also socially.

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

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.

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?

Perhaps you should compile your Perl with long doubles one of these megaseconds.

The court finds everyone to be in contempt (including himself :-), and orders everyone sentenced to five years hard labor. (Working on Perl, of course.)

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

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.

Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.

The autodecrement is not magical.

When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi.

[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.

Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something. :-)

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. :-)

It's there as a sop to former Ada programmers. :-)

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

Well, I think Perl should run faster than C. :-)

To Perl, or not to Perl, that is the kvetching.

I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'. :-)

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. :-)

Maybe we should take a clue from FTP and put in an option like 'print hash marks on every 1024 iterations'. :-)

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. :-)

> (It's sorta like sed, but not. It's sorta like awk, but not. etc.) Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.

I simultaneously believe that languages are wonderful and awful. You have to hold both of those. Ugly things can be beautiful. And beautiful can get ugly very fast. You know, take Lisp. You know, it's the most beautiful language in the world. At least up until Haskell came along. (laughter) But, you know, every program in Lisp is just ugly. I don't figure how that works.

Chip Salzenberg sent me a complete patch to add System V IPC (msg, sem and shm calls), so I added them. If that bothers you, you can always undefine them in config.sh. :-)

I dunno, I dream in Perl sometimes...

I know it's weird, but it does make it easier to write poetry in perl. :-)

It is, of course, written in Perl. Translation to C is left as an exercise for the reader. :-)

Dan Smith: I've tried (in vi) 'g/[a-z] [a-z]/s//_/'...but that doesn't cut it. Any ideas? (I take it that it may be a two-pass sort of solution). Larry Wall: In the first pass, install perl. :-)

Randal said it would be tough to do in sed. He didn't say he didn't understand sed. Randal understands sed quite well. Which is why he uses Perl. :-)

The only disadvantage I see is that it would force everyone to get Perl. Horrors. :-)

In general, if you think something isn't in Perl, try it out, because it usually is. :-)

tmps_base = tmps_max; /* protect our mortal string */

pos += screamnext[pos] /* does this goof up anywhere? */

str->str_pok |= SP_FBM; /* deep magic */ s = (unsigned char*)(str->str_ptr); /* deeper magic */

#else /* !STDSTDIO */ /* The big, slow, and stupid way */

/* This bit of chicanery makes a unary function followed by a parenthesis into a function with one argument, highest precedence. */

...Then you start building things like the Berlin wall to keep people inside your community. In anthropological terms, that's tribalism. A tribal Perl programmer might say, 'If you leave the Perl tribe to go and join the Python tribe, we will hunt you down, cook you, and eat you.' Or if you join the Ruby tribe, you will explode. By and large, I am not in favor of tribalism. Except for my tribe, of course.