Larry Wall on Philosophy

"That being said, I think we should immediately deprecate any string concatenation that combines '19' with '99'."

"Wow, I'm being shot at from both sides. That means I *must* be right."

"Of course, this being Perl, we could always take both approaches."

"If I don't document something, it's usually either for a good reason, or a bad reason. In this case it's a good reason."

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

"The only reason I've managed to run this open source project, is that I have learned to delegate even the delegation to other people. ."

"If someone stinks, view it as a reason to help them, not a reason to avoid them."

"There's really no way to fix this and still keep Perl pathologically eclectic."

"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."

"There ain't nothin' in this world that's worth being a snot over."

"Perl did not get where it is by ignoring psychological factors."

"...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."