Larry Wall

"Well, enough clowning around. Perl is, in intent, a cleaned up and summarized version of that wonderful semi-natural language known as'Unix'."

"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."

"Y'know, there are other possibilities if we assume that filenames are UTF-8...yikes...wait, put down that meat cleaver! Aieeee!!!"

"The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other."

"As with all the other proposals, it's basically just a list of words. You can deal with that..."

"People understand instinctively that the best way for computer programs to communicate with each other is for each of the them to be strict in what they emit, and liberal in what they accept. The odd …"

"As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language."

"Suppose you went back to Ada Lovelace and asked her the difference between a script and a program. She'd probably look at you funny, then say something like: Well, a script is what you give the actors…"