Larry Wall on Mind

"So I'm thinking about ??, or !!, or //, or \\, or whatever. But I think I like ?? the best so far. Or the least worst."

"Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things."

"There is, however, a strange, musty smell in the air that reminds me of something...hmm...yes...I've got it...there's a VMS nearby, or I'm a Blit."

"The way these things go, there are probably 6 or 8 kludgey ways to do it, and a better way that involves rethinking something that hasn't been rethunk yet."

"One thing I do understand is that people get scared when I start thinking out loud."

"Even if you aren't in doubt, consider the mental welfare of the person who has to maintain the code after you, and who will probably put parens in the wrong place."

"My arthritic pinkies are already starting to ache just thinking about ||||=."

"If you consistently take an antagonistic approach, however, people are going to start thinking you're from New York."

"I think you didn't get a reply because you used the terms 'correct' and 'proper', neither of which has much meaning in Perl culture."

"Think of prototypes as a funny markup language--the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine."

"But you have to allow a little for the desire to evangelize when you think you have good news."

"I note that the Python folks still think they like JPython. I wonder how long that will last?"

"cut in regexpsI don't think we reached consensus on that. We're still backtracking..."

"I'm serious about thinking through all the possibilities before we settle on anything. All things have the advantages of their disadvantages, and vice versa."

"You can't have filenames longer than 14 chars. You can't even think about them!"

"There are still some other things to do, so don't think if I didn't fix your favorite bug that your bug report is in the bit bucket. (It may be, but don't think it."

"I'd make people say 'use Fork;' if I thought I could get away with it."

"I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident."

"(Never thought I'd be telling Malcolm and Ilya the same thing..."

"Odd that we think definitions are definitive."

"Well, I think Perl should run faster than C."

"I don't think it's worth washing hogs over."

"Oh, wait, that was Randal...nevermind..."

"But you could do extreme programming. In fact, I had a college buddy I did pair programming with. We took a compiler writing class together and studied all that fancy stuff from the dragon book. Then of course the professor announced we would be implementing our own language, called PL/0. After thinking about it a while, we announced that we were going to do our project in BASIC. The professor looked at us like we were insane. Nobody else in the class was using BASIC. And you know what? Nobody else in the class finished their compiler either. We not only finished but added I/O extensions, and called it PL 0.5. That's rapid prototyping."