Larry Wall on Friendship

"If I allowed 'next $label' then I'd also have to allow 'goto $label', and I don't think you really want that..."

"I'm afraid my gut level reaction is basically, proceed is cute, but cute doesn't cut it in the emergency room."

"Perl itself is usually pretty good about telling you what you shouldn't do."

"And in the limiting case where the optimizer is completely broken because it's not implemented yet, we get to work around that too. Optionally..."

"Besides, it's good to force C programmers to use the toolbox occasionally."

"P.S. I suppose I really should be nicer to people today, considering I'll be singing in Billy Graham's choir tonight..."

"It's appositival, if it's there. And it doesn't have to be there. And it's really obvious that it's there when it's there."

"Magically turning people's old scalar contexts into list contexts is a recipe for several kinds of disaster."

"And other operators aren't so special syntactically, but weird in other ways, like 'scalar', and 'goto'."

"There are probably better ways to do that, but it would make the parser more complex. I do, occasionally, struggle feebly against complexity..."

"That could certainly be done, but I don't want to fall into the Forth trap, where every running Forth implementation is really a different language."

"As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be visually distinct."

"If you want to program in C, program in C. It's a nice language. I use it occasionally..."

"We question most of the mantras around here periodically, in case you hadn't noticed."

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

"I've always maintained a cordial dislike for indent, because it's usuallyright."

"Personally, I like to defiantly split my infinitives."

"It's not really a rule--it's more like a trend."