A Quote by Erik Naggum
What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix.
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The whole intent of Perl 5's module system was to encourage the growth of Perl culture rather than the Perl core.
So many computer languages try to force you into one way of thinking and Perl is very much the opposite of that approach. It's kind of like a, well, sometimes Perl has been called the Swiss army chainsaw of the internet, but it's more like a Swiss army machine shop. It really gives you a lot of tools, some of which are dangerous, but it lets you get your job done very quickly.
I like working in small teams where people on the team have very different skills than what I have and that banter back and forth, and the ability to build something collectively that none of you could do individually is actually a really useful and valuable thing.
The government of India is consistently very advanced. When the world was hesitant on UNIX, we were the first to move in; the RBI said that all banks will implement on UNIX. It worked!
I admire people who are very successful. But if that success has been achieved through too much ruthlessness, then I may admire that person, but I can't respect him.
When I announced the development of Perl 6, I said it was going to be a community design. I designed Perl, myself. It's limited by my own brain power. So I wanted Perl 6 to be a community design.
Nobody would know me from my own description of myself; which is why, when called upon (rarely, I grant) to provide an account, I tailor it, I adapt, I try to provide an outline that can, in some way, correlate to the outline that people understand me to have -- that, I suppose, I actually have, at this point. But who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It's the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding.
You never cede control of your own ability to be successful to something called racism.
I think the ability to focus is a thread that runs through so-called successful people. And that's something that can be developed. It can be self-taught.
Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
Good storytelling for me is not so much technical expertise, which I know is applauded often; it's actually freshness of approach. It does mean you sometimes stumble and fall and make a horrible mess of things in seeking that freshness, but you should always keep trying to do that.
Comedians take a neat situation and turn it into a mess. And in my books I do the same thing, but it's the other way around. I like to mess around with mess. A mess is only a mess because someone tells you it is.
I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that stuff out of Unix. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic, and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot it.'"
No matter how much I admire our schools, I know that no university exists that can provide an education; what a university can provide is an outline, to give the learner a direction and guidance. The rest one has to do for oneself.
Crime, especially crime involving money, reflects the gap between the expectation to provide and the ability to provide... If we really want men to commit crime as infrequently as women, we can start by not expecting men to provide for women more than we expect women to provide for men.
There is no schedule. We are all volunteers, so we get it done when we get it done. Perl 5 still works fine, and we plan to take the right amount of time on Perl 6.
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