text:
Indira Gandhi

Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi (November 19, 1917 – October 31, 1984) was an Indian politician and a central figure of the Indian National Congress. She was the 3rd prime minister of India and was also the first and, to date, only female prime minister of India. Indira Gandhi was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the 1st prime minister of India. She served as prime minister from January 1966 to March 1977 and again from January 1980 until her assassination in October 1984, making her the second longest-serving Indian prime minister after her father.

As prime minister, Gandhi was known for her political intransigency and unprecedented centralisation of power. She went to war with Pakistan in support of the independence movement and war of independence in East Pakistan, which resulted in an Indian victory and the creation of Bangladesh, as well as increasing India's influence to the point where it became the sole regional power of South Asia. Citing separatist tendencies, and in response to a call for revolution, Gandhi instituted a state of emergency from 1975 to 1977 where basic civil liberties were suspended and the press was censored. Widespread atrocities were carried out during the emergency. In 1980, she returned to power after free and fair elections. After Gandhi ordered military action in the Golden Temple in Operation Blue Star, her own bodyguards and Sikh nationalists assassinated her on 31 October 1984.

Quotes

 * We admired Dr. King. We felt his loss as our own. The tragedy rekindled memories of the great martyrs of all time who gave their lives so that men might live and grow. We thought of the great men in your own country who fell to the assassin's bullet and of Mahatma Gandhi's martyrdom here in this city, this very month, twenty-one years ago. Such events remain as wounds in the human consciousness, reminding us of battles, yet to be fought and tasks still to be accomplished. We should not mourn for men of high ideals. Rather we should rejoice that we had the privilege of having had them with us, to inspire us by their radiant personalities.
 * Luther King", speech at the presentation of the Jawaharial Nehru Award for International Understanding to Coretta Scott King in New Delhi, India (January 24, 1969). Published in  Selected Speeches and Writings of Indira Gandhi, September 1972-March 1977 (New Delhi : Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1984. pp. 312-313).

 * The great need in the world today is for for nations to so define their national interest that it makes for greater harmony, greater equality and justice and greater stability in the world.
 * 1980 to Roy Jenkins <

 * We believe in freedom with a passion that only those who have been denied it for so long can understand it, We believe in equality because so many in our nation have been denied for so long, we believe in human worth for that is the basis for all our current work in India.
 * Jul 29 1982

 * A nation's strength ultimately consists in what it can do on its own, and not in what it can borrow from others.
 * "Preface, 4th Five Year Plan", Government of India Planning Commission (July 18, 1970).

 * India wants to avoid a war at all costs but it is not a one-sided affair, you cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.
 * Press conference, New Delhi (October 19, 1971), quoted in "Indian and Pakistani Armies Confront Each Other Along Borders" by Sydney H. Schanberg, The New York Times (October 20, 1971), page 6C.

 * There are grave misgivings that the discussion on ecology may be designed to distract attention from the problems of war and poverty.
 * First global conference on the human environment (UNCHE) in Stockholm in June 1972 by UN.

 * There are moments in history when brooding tragedy and its dark shadows can be lightened by recalling great moments of the past.
 * Letter to Richard Nixon (December 15, 1971).

 * All unprejudiced persons objectively surveying the grim events in Bangladesh since March 25 have recognized the revolt of 75 million people, a people who were forced to the conclusion that neither their life, nor their liberty, to say nothing of the possibility of the pursuit of happiness, was available to them.
 * Referring to the fundamental rights of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" in the United States Declaration of Independence in a letter to Richard Nixon (December 15, 1971)..

 * Dacca is now the free capital of a free country.
 * Address to Parliament announcing the victory of Bangladesh-India Forces over the Pakistan Army, (December 16, 1971).

 * You must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose.
 * "The Embattled Woman Who Relishes Crosswords, Children...and Running India," People (June 30, 1975).

 * My father was a statesman, I'm a political woman. My father was a saint. I'm not.
 * Quoted in "Indira's Coup," profile by Oriana Fallaci, The New York Review of Books (September 18, 1975).

 * To be liberated, woman must feel free to be herself, not in rivalry to man but in the context of her own capacity and her personality.
 * "True Liberation Of Women", speech, inauguration of the All-India Women's Conference Building Complex in New Delhi, India (March 26, 1980).  Published in Selected Speeches and Writings of Indira Gandhi, September 1972-March 1977 (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1984, pp. 417-418).

 * We make no discrimination against the adherent of any religion. All faiths are entitled to equal protection and equal respect. This we have named "Secularism", which entitles each Indian to pursue his own belief and learn more about his own creed. But it also requires him to extend the same right to persons of other religions.
 * 28 January 1981, as quoted in Towards a New India (1994) by, p. 16.

 * I am not interested in a long life. I am not afraid of these things. I don't mind if my life goes in the service of this nation. If I die today, every drop of my blood will invigorate the nation.
 * Speech, Bhubaneswar, India (October 30, 1984), quoted in "Death in the Garden," by William E. Smith, Time (November 12, 1984).

 * I am here today, I may not be here tomorrow. But the responsibility to look after national interest is on the shoulder of every citizen of India. I have often mentioned this earlier. Nobody knows how many attempts have been made to shoot me, lathis have been used to beat me. In Bhubaneswar itself, a brickbat hit me. They have attacked me in every possible manner. I do not care whether I live or die. I have lived a long life and I am proud that I spend the whole of my life in the service of my people. I am only proud of this and nothing else. I shall continue to serve until my last breath and when I die, I can say, that every drop of my blood will invigorate India and strengthen it.
 * In:Selected Speeches of Indira Gandhi: January 1, 1982-October 30, 1984, Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1986, p. 495.
 * Her last speech delivered in Orissa on 30 October 1984 before she was assassinated.

The Mitrokhin Archive

 *    Christopher Andrew, Vasili Mitrokhin - The Mitrokhin Archive II - The KGB in the World-Penguin (2018)

 * From 1967 to 1973 Haksar, a former protégé of Krishna Menon, was Mrs Gandhi’s most trusted adviser. One of her biographers, Katherine Frank, describes him as ‘a magnetic figure’ who became ‘probably the most influential and powerful person in the government’ as well as ‘the most important civil servant in the country’. Haksar set out to turn a civil service which, at least in principle, was politically neutral into an ideologically ‘committed bureaucracy’. His was the hand that guided Mrs Gandhi through her turn to the left, the nationalization of the banks and the split in the Congress Party. It was Haksar also who was behind the transfer of control of the intelligence community to the Prime Minister’s Secretariat. His advocacy of the leftward turn in Mrs Gandhi’s policies sprang, however, from his socialist convictions rather than from manipulation by the KGB. But both he and Mrs Gandhi ‘were less fastidious than Nehru had been about interfering with the democratic system and structure of government to attain their ideological ends’. The journalist Inder Malhotra noted the growth of a ‘courtier culture’ in Indira Gandhi’s entourage: ‘The power centre in the world’s largest democracy was slowly turning into a durbar.’

 * In the early 1970s, the KGB presence in India became one of the largest in the world outside the Soviet bloc. Indira Gandhi placed no limit on the number of Soviet diplomats and trade officials, thus allowing the KGB and GRU as many cover positions as they wished. Nor, like many other states, did India object to admitting Soviet intelligence officers who had been expelled by less hospitable regimes. The expansion of KGB operations in the Indian subcontinent (and first and foremost in India) during the early 1970s led the FCD to create a new department. Hitherto operations in India, as in the rest of non-Communist South and South-East Asia, had been the responsibility of the Seventh Department. In 1974 the newly founded Seventeenth Department was given charge of the Indian subcontinent.

 * The KGB, in Kalugin’s view, was more successful than the CIA, partly because of its skill in exploiting the corruption which became endemic under Indira Gandhi’s regime. As Inder Malhotra noted, though corruption was not new in India: People expected Indira Gandhi’s party, committed to bringing socialism to the country, to be more honest and cleaner than the old undivided Congress. But this turned out to be a vain hope. On the contrary, compared with the amassing of wealth by some of her close associates, the misdeeds of the discarded Syndicate leaders, once looked upon as godfathers of corrupt Congressmen, began to appear trivial.

 * Suitcases full of banknotes were said to be routinely taken to the Prime Minister’s house. Former Syndicate member S. K. Patil is reported to have said that Mrs Gandhi did not even return the suitcases... The Prime Minister is unlikely to have paid close attention to the dubious origins of some of the funds which went into Congress’s coffers. That was a matter which she left largely to her principal fundraiser, Lalit Narayan Mishra, who – though she doubtless did not realize it – also accepted Soviet money. On at least one occasion a secret gift of 2 million rupees from the Politburo to Congress (R) was personally delivered after midnight by the head of Line PR in New Delhi, Leonid Shebarshin. Another million rupees were given on the same occasion to a newspaper which supported Mrs Gandhi. Short and obese with several chins, Mishra looked the part of the corrupt politician he increasingly became. Indira Gandhi, despite her own frugal lifestyle, depended on the money he collected from a variety of sources to finance Congress (R). So did her son and anointed heir, Sanjay, whose misguided ambition to build an Indian popular car and become India’s Henry Ford depended on government favours.

 * The greatest successes of Soviet active measures in India remained the exploitation of the susceptibility of Indira Gandhi and her advisers to bogus CIA conspiracies against them.

 * India under Indira Gandhi was also probably the arena for more KGB active measures than anywhere else in the world, though their significance appears to have been considerably exaggerated by the Centre, which overestimated its ability to manipulate Indian opinion.

Oriana Fallaci. Interview with Indira Gandhi in New Delhi, February 1972

 * Oriana Fallaci. (2011). Interview with Indira Gandhi, in : Interviews with history and conversations with power. New York: Rizzoli.

 * They say that [I am icy, hard] because I’m sincere. Even too sincere. And because I don’t waste time in flowery small talk, as people do in India, where the first half hour is spent in compliments: »How are you, how are your children, how are your grandchildren, and so forth.« I refuse to indulge in small talk. And compliments, if at all, I save for after the job is done. But in India people can’t stomach this attitude of mine, and when I say, »Hurry up, let’s get to the point,« they feel hurt. And think I’m cold, indeed icy, hard. Then there’s another reason, one that goes with my frankness: I don’t put on an act. I don’t know how to put on an act; I always show myself for what I am, in whatever mood I’m in. If I’m happy, I look happy; if I’m angry, I show it. Without worrying about how others may react. When one has had a life as difficult as mine, one doesn’t worry about how others will react. And now go ahead. You can ask anything you like.

 * But we couldn’t do otherwise. We couldn’t keep ten million refugees on our soil; we couldn’t tolerate such an unstable situation for who knows how long. That influx of refugees would have stopped—on the contrary. It would have gone on and on and on, until there would have been an explosion. We were no longer able to control the arrival of those people, in our own interest we had to stop it! That’s what I said to Mr. Nixon, to all the other leaders I visited in an attempt to avert the war. However, when you look at the beginning of the actual war, it’s hard not to recognize that the Pakistanis were the ones to attack. They were the ones who descended on us with their planes, at five o’clock that afternoon when the first bombs fell on Agra. I can prove it to you by the fact that we were taken completely by surprise.

 * I made the trip knowing I was like the child putting his finger into the hole in the dike. And there are things that ... I don’t know ... one can’t ... oh, why not! The truth is that I spoke clearly to Mr. Nixon. And I told him what I had already told Mr. Heath, Mr. Pompidou, Mr. Brandt. I told him without mincing words that we couldn’t go on with ten million refugees on our backs, we couldn’t tolerate the fuse of such and explosive situation any longer. Well, Mr. Heath, Mr. Pompidou, and Mr. Brandt had understood very well. But not Mr. Nixon. The fact is that when the others understand one thing, Mr. Nixon understands another. I suspected he was very pro-Pakistan. Or rather I knew that the Americans had always been in favor of Pakistan—not so much because they were in favor of Pakistan, but because they were against India.

 * However, I had recently had the impression they were changing—not so much by becoming less pro-Pakistan as by becoming less anti-India. I was wrong. My visit to Nixon did anything but avert the war. It was useful only to me. The experience taught me that when people do something against you, that something always turns out in your favor. At least you can use it to your advantage. It’s a law of life—check it and you’ll see it holds true in every situation of life. ... And do you know why I won this war? Because my army was able to do it, yes, but also because the Americans were on the side of Pakistan.

 * As for the position they held in this war ... well, I think they’ve been more skillful than the Americans. Certainly they’ve had a lighter touch—had they wanted to, they could have done more for Pakistan. Isn’t that so? It was the Americans who sent the Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal, not the Chinese.

 * India had barely become independent, in 1947, when Pakistan invaded Kashmir, which at the time was ruled by a maharajah. The maharajah fled, and the people of Kashmir, led by Sheikh Abdullah, asked for Indian help. Lord Mountbatten, who was still governor general, replied that he wouldn’t be able to supply aid to Kashmir unless Pakistan declared war, and he didn’t seem bothered by the fact that the Pakistanis were slaughtering the population. So our leaders decided to sign a document by which they bound themselves to go to war with Pakistan. And Mahatma Gandhi, apostle of nonviolence, signed along with them. Yes, he chose war. He said there was nothing else to do. War is inevitable when one must defend somebody or defend oneself.

 * Look, I don’t see the world as something divided between right and left. And I don’t at all care who’s on the right or left or in the center. Even though we use them, even though I use them myself, these expressions have lost all meaning. I’m not interested in one label or the other—I’m only interested in solving certain problems, in getting where I want to go. I have certain objectives.

 * I’m not for nationalization because of the rhetoric of nationalization, or because I see in nationalization the cure-all for every injustice. I’m for nationalization in cases where it’s necessary.

 * In India, women have never been in hostile competition with men-even in the most distant past, every time a woman emerged as a leader, perhaps as a queen, the people accepted her. As something normal and not exceptional. Let’s not forget that in India the symbol of strength is a woman; the goddess Shakti. Not only that—the struggle for inde pendence here has been conducted in equal measure by men and by women. And when we got our independence, no one forgot that. In the Western world, on the other hand, nothing of the kind has ever happened—women have participated, yes, but revolutions have always been made by men alone.

 * Yes, it’s true. It’s true that Joan of Arc was my dream as a little girl. I discovered her toward the age of ten or twelve, when I went to France. I don’t remember where I read about her, but I recall that she immediately took on a definite importance for me. I wanted to sacrifice my life for my country. It seems like foolishness and yet ... what happens when we’re children is engraved forever in our lives.

 * Happiness is such a fleeting point of view—there’s no such thing as continual happiness. There are only moments of happiness—from contentment to ecstasy. And if by happiness you mean ecstasy ... Yes, I’ve known ecstasy, and it’s a blessing to be able to say it because those who can say it are very few. But ecstasy doesn’t last long and is seldom ever repeated. If by happiness you mean an ordinary contentment, then yes—I’m fairly contented. Not satisfied—contented. Satisfied is a word I use only in reference to my country, and I’ll never be satisfied for my country. For this reason I go on taking difficult paths, and between a paved road and a footpath that goes up the mountain, I choose the footpath. To the great irritation of my bodyguards.

Quotes about Indira Gandhi

 * Before Washington, Indira Gandhi stopped in New York, where she dazzled Hannah Arendt, herself a longtime critic of British rule in India. The political theorist breathlessly described Gandhi as “very good-looking, almost beautiful, very charming, flirting with every man in the room, without chichi, and entirely calm—she must have known already that she was going to make war and probably enjoyed it even in a perverse way. The toughness of these women once they have got what they wanted is really something!”
 * Hannah Arendt, quoted from Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide. ch 16

 * I don't even respect her. To me she's a mediocre woman with a mediocre intelligence. There's nothing great about her... Mrs. Gandhi [came to power] by the simple fact of being Nehru’s daughter. Without having Nehru's light. With all her saris, the red spot on her forehead, her little smile, she'll never succeed in impressing me. She's never impressed me.
 * Ali Bhutto, in an interview to Oriana Fallaci. Oriana Fallaci. Interview with Ali Bhutto in Karachi, April 1972.    Oriana Fallaci. (2011). Interview in : Interviews with history and conversations with power. New York: Rizzoli.

 * The unceremonious exit of Mr. M.C. Chagla from her Cabinet and the relaxation of the rule prohibiting polygamy among Muslim employees of the Central Government are but two examples of the concessions she [Indira Gandhi] is making to Muslim communalism.
 * Hamid Dalwai (Muslim social reformer, thinker, activist) in Muslim Politics, quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2014). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p. 363

 * In the end, Indira Gandhi has earned her name as a great martyr on the doorsteps of history. With her courage and efficiency, she demonstrated that only she understood the realities of our corrupt and divided society and was capable of uniting the country dominated by rotten politics. She was a great woman and in her valiant death, she has become greater.
 * Nanaji Deshmukh, Quoted in Friends Of Saffron Outlook Magazine, 27 April 1998

 * Indira Gandhi was the least egotistical great statesman I ever met. She hardly ever talked about herself; she could reduce all personal questions to a proper perspective. She was much more interested in the great political questions: the way the world was going, how the unity of her beloved India could be preserved, how the poverty of her people could be broken, how nuclear annihilation could be averted.
 * Michael Foot, ‘Prison Does Concentrate the Mind Wonderfully’, Literary Review (June 1992)

 * The future patroness of compulsory sterilization had become, in the meantime, head of the government.
 * Hitchens, C. (2012). The missionary position: Mother Theresa in theory and practice.

 * She's a real prune—bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman.
 * Jacqueline Kennedy in 1964, as quoted in Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy (2011)

 * She was a woman of immense stature whose life was full of turmoil, challenge and great achievement. From the age of 12, when she joined the non-co-operation movement, her whole life was given to securing the emancipation of her country, first in the struggle for independence and then in the even more monumental task of economic and political development. Mrs. Gandhi knew, in the words of her friend, Aneurin Bevan, that political liberty is the by-product of economic sufficiency. In that knowledge she fought a lifelong contest against poverty and against war, the bringer of poverty. For nearly 20 years...Indira Gandhi was the most important figure in that country. Throughout that time the principles that guided her were devotion to the maintenance of parliamentary democracy and determination to produce tolerance and common purpose out of the diversity and distinctiveness of the peoples of India.
 * Neil Kinnock, speech in the House of Commons (31 October 1984)

 * The question before us is not whether Indira Gandhi should continue to be prime minister or not. The point is whether democracy in this country is to survive or not. The democratic structure stands on three pillars, namely a strong opposition, independent judiciary and free press. Emergency has destroyed all these essentials.
 * Sant Harcharan Singh Longowal in: Transforming India, Harvard University Press, 16 September 2013, p. 28.

 * She [Mrs Gandhi] has still today overwhelming support in the country. I believe the prime minister of India will continue in office until the electorate of India decides otherwise.
 * B.K.Nehru in: 1975: Gandhi found guilty of corruption, BBC News, 12 June.

 * In keeping with the great secrecy involved in India's efforts to develop and test its first nuclear explosive device, the project employed no more than 75 scientists and engineers working on it in the period from 1967 to 1974. Of course this does not count the thousands of individuals required to build and operate the infrastructure supporting BARC and to produce the plutonium for the device. Outside of those actually working on the project, only about three other people in India knew of it - Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, her trusted adviser and former principal secretary P.N. Haksar, and her current principal secretary D.P. Dhar. No government ministers, including the Defense Minister, were informed.  The implosion system was designed to compress the core to twice its normal density. The lenses that were developed used the fast-slow explosive design pioneered by the U.S. in World War II. Like the Gadget exploded at Trinity in 1945, they used an RDX-TNT mixture as the fast explosive, with baratol (barium nitrate and TNT) used as the slow explosive. Chengappa describes the inner slow explosive component as being in the shape of "Shiva ling am" -- a phallus in Hindu religious art which is squat and blunt in form. The device used 12 lens, which is described by Chengappa [pg. 182]: "the way the explosives were placed around the plutonium sphere resembled the petals of the lotus". This presumably indicates that each hemisphere of the implosion system consisted of 6 longitudinal lens segments (asymmetric diamond shaped lenses) joined together at the pole so that they formed triangular teeth at the equator which interlocked with the opposite hemisphere. This design is simpler and less sophisticated than the 32-lens "soccer ball" system developed by the U.S. during World War II.
 * Nuclearweaponarchive.org, "India's Nuclear Weapons Program", (November 8, 2001).

 * We should remember that she probably lost her life in defending the unity of her country, that most precious asset, with its democracy. We should also remember that perhaps her greatest legacy is that she hands to her son a united and democratic country.
 * David Owen, speech in the House of Commons (31 October 1984)

 * Indira is India and India is Indira.
 * Sidhartha Shankar Ray in: SACRIFICIAL GOATS SCAPEGOATS and GUINEA PIGs: Misadventures and Misrepresentations, AuthorHouse, 2007, p. 79
 * Her ardent follower coined this sentence during Emergency.

 * This despicable act has robbed India of a great and courageous leader. Daughter of Pandit Nehru, one of the pioneers of India's independence, she led her country for a total of 16 years as Prime Minister, a period which saw India's emergence as an industrial power as well as a major influence in world affairs. Her death has also robbed the Commonwealth of a statesman of outstanding stature and experience.
 * Margaret Thatcher, speech in the House of Commons (31 October 1984)

 * I lunched with Indira Gandhi in her own modest home, where she insisted on seeing that her guests were all looked after and clearing away the plates while discussing matters of high politics. ... I found myself liking Mrs Gandhi herself. Perhaps I naturally sympathized with a woman politician faced with the huge strains and difficulties of governing a country as vast as India.
 * Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power (1995), p. 385

title: Indira Gandhi


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Larry Wall

Larry Arnold Wall (born September 27, 1954) is a programmer, best known as the creator of the Perl programming language.

1990

 * Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something.

 * And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is.

 * Because . doesn't match \n. [\0-\377] is the most efficient way to match everything currently.  Maybe \e should match everything.  And \E would of course match nothing.

 * Besides, REAL computers have a rename system call.

 * Chip Salzenberg sent me a complete patch to add System V IPC (msg, sem and shm calls), so I added them. If that bothers you, you can always undefine them in config.sh.

 * I don't know if it's what you want, but it's what you get.

 * I dunno, I dream in Perl sometimes...

Larry Wall: Let's call it an accidental feature.
 * Piet van Oostrum: I find this a nice feature but it is not according to the documentation. Or is it a BUG?

 * (To someone at New York University) If you consistently take an antagonistic approach, however, people are going to start thinking you're from New York.

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

 * I know it's weird, but it does make it easier to write poetry in perl.

 * I'm sure that that could be indented more readably, but I'm scared of the awk parser.

 * It is, of course, written in Perl. Translation to C is left as an exercise for the reader.

 * It's all magic.

 * It's documented in The Book, somewhere...

 * It won't be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all...

Larry Wall: In the first pass, install perl.
 * Dan Smith: I've tried (in vi) 'g/[a-z]\n[a-z]/s//_/'...but that doesn't cut it. Any ideas?  (I take it that it may be a two-pass sort of solution).

 * Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality...

 * Let us be charitable, and call it a misleading feature

 * Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

 * Randal said it would be tough to do in sed. He didn't say he didn't understand sed.  Randal understands sed quite well.  Which is why he uses Perl.

 * Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

 * The only disadvantage I see is that it would force everyone to get Perl. Horrors.

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

 * 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.

 * Though I'll admit readability suffers slightly...

 * What about WRITING it first and rationalizing it afterwards?

 * You want it in one line? Does it have to fit in 80 columns?

1991

 * All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory...

 * Besides, including <std_ice_cubes.h> is a fatal error on machines that don't have it yet. Bad language design, there...

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

 * Hey, I had to let awk be better at *something*...

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

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

 * I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident.
 * On s/foo/bar/eieio

 * It's there as a sop to former Ada programmers.
 * Regarding 10_000_000

 * I won't mention any names, because I don't want to get sun4's into trouble...

 * Just don't create a file called -rf.

 * That's gonna be tough for Randal to beat...

 * No, I'm not going to explain it. If you can't figure it out, you didn't want to know anyway...

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

 * Sorry. My testing organization is either too small, or too large, depending on how you look at it.

 * There are many times when you want it to ignore the rest of the string just like atof does. Oddly enough, Perl calls atof.  How convenient.

 * We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise.

1992

 * ... an initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer.

 * And I don't like doing silly things (except on purpose).

 * :       And it goes against the grain of building small tools.Innocent, Your Honor.  Perl users build small tools all day long.

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

 * Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.

 * 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.

 * If you want to see useful Perl examples, we can certainly arrange to have comp.lang.misc flooded with them, but I don't think that would help the advance of civilization.

 * > (It's sorta like sed, but not. It's sorta like awk, but not.  etc.)Guilty as charged.  Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.

 * Just don't compare it with a real language, or you'll be unhappy...

 * Lispers are among the best grads of the Sweep-It-Under-Someone-Else's-Carpet School of Simulated Simplicity. [Was that sufficiently incendiary?]

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

 * ...this does not mean that some of us should not want, in a rather dispassionate sort of way, to put a bullet through csh's head.

 * Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to pay another nickel. But hey!  You only feel 5 cents poorer each time.

 * What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against?

 * You have to admit that it's difficult to misplace the Perl sources.

 * Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.

1994

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

 * Anyway, there's plenty of room for doubt. It might seem easy enough, but computer language design is just like a stroll in the park.Jurassic Park, that is.

 * Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.

 * I don't like your I-can-use-anything-as-an-adjective attitude.

1997

 * I want to see people using Perl to glue things together creatively, not just technically but also socially.

 * The whole history of computers is rampant with cheerleading at best and bigotry at worst.

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

 * As usual, I'm overstating the case to knock a few neurons loose, but the truth is usually somewhere in the muddle, uh, middle.

 * Odd that we think definitions are definitive.

 * : But for some things, Perl just isn't the optimal choice.(yet)

 * I don't like this official/unofficial distinction. It sound, er, officious.

 * If you write something wrong enough, I'll be glad to make up a new witticism just for you.

 * So far we've managed to avoid turning Perl into APL.

 * Not that I have anything much against redundancy. But I said that already.

 * They can always run stderr through uniq.

 * I'd put my money where my mouth is, but my mouth keeps moving.

 * Of course, I reserve the right to make wholly stupid changes to Perl if I think they improve the language.

 * Call me bored, but don't call me boring.

 * I think $[ is more like a coelacanth than a mastadon.

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

 * 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.

 * Tcl long ago fell into the Forth trap, and is now trying desperately to extricate itself (with some help from Sun's marketing department).

 * The whole intent of Perl 5's module system was to encourage the growth of Perl culture rather than the Perl core.

 * Randal can write one-liners again. Everyone is happy, and peace spreads over the whole Earth.

 * Life gets boring, someone invents another necessity, and once again we turn the crank on the screwjack of progress hoping that nobody gets screwed.

 * No prisoner's dilemma here. Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism.  More fun, too.  Ask any mitochondria.

 * P.S. Perl's master plan (or what passes for one) is to take over the world like English did. Er, *as* English did...

 * You can prove anything by mentioning another computer language.

 * 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.

 * I'm sure a mathematician would claim that 0 and 1 are both very interesting numbers.

 * True, it returns ' ' for false, but ' ' is an even more interesting number than 0.

 * Any false value is gonna be fairly boring in Perl, mathematicians notwithstanding.

 * We didn't put in ^^ because then we'd have to keep telling people what it means, and then we'd have to keep telling them why it doesn't short circuit. :-/

 * Anybody want a binary telemetry frame editor written in Perl?

 * Perhaps I'm missing the gene for making enemies.

 * Perl has a long tradition of working around compilers.

 * Personally, I like to defiantly split my infinitives.

 * Real theology is always rather shocking to people who already think they know what they think. I'm still shocked myself.

 * The computer should be doing the hard work. That's what it's paid to do, after all.

 * The following two statements are usually both true:     There's not enough documentation.   There's too much documentation.

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

 * The random quantum fluctuations of my brain are historical accidents that happen to have decided that the concepts of dynamic scoping and lexical scoping are orthogonal and should remain that way.

 * At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.

 * 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.

 * Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.

 * Sometimes we choose the generalization. Sometimes we don't.

 * I wouldn't ever write the full sentence myself, but then, I never use goto either.

 * 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.

 * Oh, get ahold of yourself. Nobody's proposing that we parse English.

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

 * I hope I'm not getting so famous that I can't think out load [sic] anymore.

 * It would be possible to optimize some forms of goto, but I haven't bothered.

 * A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.

 * How do Crays and Alphas handle the POSIX problem?

 * Well, that's more-or-less what I was saying, though obviously addition is a little more cosmic than the bitwise operators.

 * You tell it that it's indicative by appending $!. That's why we made $! such a short variable name, after all.

 * The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer.

 * As someone pointed out, you could have an attribute that says 'optimize the heck out of this routine', and your definition of heck would be a parameter to the optimizer.

 * If you're going to define a shortcut, then make it the base [sic] darn shortcut you can.

 * It is my job in life to travel all roads, so that some may take the road less travelled, and others the road more travelled, and all have a pleasant day.

 * It's getting harder and harder to think out loud. One of these days someone's gonna go off and kill Thomas a'Becket for me...

 * I was about to say, 'Avoid fame like the plague,' but you know, they can cure the plague with penicillin these days.

 * 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.

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

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

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

 * And we can always supply them with a program that makes identical files into links to a single file.

 * I wasn't recommending that we make the links for them, only provide them with the tools to do so if they want to take the gamble (or the gambol).

 * This has been planned for some time. I guess we'll just have to find someone with an exceptionally round tuit.

 * switch (ref $@) {   OverflowError => warn 'Dam needs to be drained';    DomainError =>        warn 'King needs to be trained';    NuclearWarError =>   die;
    }

 * I surely do hope that's a syntax error.

 * Anyway, my money is still on use strict vars . ..

 * If you remove stricture from a large Perl program currently, you're just installing delayed bugs, whereas with this feature, you're installing an instant bug that's easily fixed. Whoopee.

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

 * It's certainly easy to calculate the average attendance for Perl conferences.

 * Tcl tends to get ported to weird places like routers.

 * Historically Tcl has always stored all intermediate results as strings. (With 8.0 they're rethinking that.  Of course, Perl rethought that from the start.)

 * Just don't make the '9' format pack/unpack numbers...

 * I think that's easier to read. Pardon me.  Less difficult to read.

 * To ordinary folks, conversion is not always automatic. It's something that may or may not require explicit assistance.  See Billy Graham.

 * Well, you can implement a Perl peek with unpack('P',..). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity.

 * It may be possible to get this condition from within Perl if a signal handler runs at just the wrong moment. Another point for Chip...

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

 * The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.

 * That should probably be written:
   no !@#$%^&*:@!semicolon

 * That gets us out of deciding how to spell Reg[eE]xp?|RE . . . Of course, then we have to decide what ref $re returns...

 * 'Course, that doesn't work when 'a' contains parentheses.

 * I was trying not to mention backtracking. Which, of course, means that yours is 'righter' than mine, in a theoretical sense.

 * Not that I'm against sneaking some notions into people's heads upon occasion. (Or blasting them in outright.)

 * (To the extent that anyone but a Prolog programmer can understand \X totally. (And to the extent that a Prolog programmer can understand 'cut'.)

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

 * You don't have to wait--you can have it in 5.004_54 or so.

 * There's something to be said for returning the whole syntax tree.

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

 * Double *sigh*. _04 is going onto thousands of CDs even as we speak, so to speak.

 * The code also assumes that it's difficult to misspell 'a' or 'b'.

 * Well, hey, let's just make everything into a closure, and then we'll have our general garbage collector, installed by 'use less memory'.

 * People who understand context would be steamed to have someone else dictating how they can call it.

 * For the sake of argument I'll ignore all your fighting words.

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

 * 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.

 * Beauty? What's that?

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

 * I suppose one could claim that an undocumented feature has no semantics. :-(

 * Yes, we have consensus that we need 64 bit support.

 * : - cut in regexps

I don't think we reached consensus on that.  We're still backtracking...

 * Boss:  You forgot to assign the result of your map!
Hacker: Dang, I'm always forgetting my assignations...
Boss:   And what's that 'goto' doing there?!?
Hacker: Er, I guess my finger slipped when I was typing 'getservbyport'...
Boss:   Ah well, accidents will happen.  Maybe we should have picked APL.

 * Perhaps they will have to outlaw sending random lists of words. fee fie foe foo

 * Hey, if pi == 3, and three == 0, does that make pi == 0?

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

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

 * Portability should be the default.

 * If this were Ada, I suppose we'd just constant fold 1/0 into

   die 'Illegal division by zero

 * Are you perchance running on a 64-bit machine?

 * Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose.

 * There's some entertainment value in watching people juggle nitroglycerin.

 * Reserve your abuse for your true friends.

1998

 * Er, Tom, I hate to be the one to point this out, but your fix list is starting to resemble a feature list. You must be human or something.

 * It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.

 * Perl will always provide the null.

 * It's easy to solve the halting problem with a shotgun.

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

 * To Perl, or not to Perl, that is the kvetching.

 * I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'.

 * Well, you know, Hubbard had a bunch of people sworn to commit suicide when he died. So of course he never officially died...

 * Even the White House has a press agent.

 * That's a valid argument. I just don't think it's valid enough.

 * Perl should remain fast and intuitive (to the extent that it is :-)

 * I would estimate that the number of programs it breaks in the world will be less than 10. As long as one of those 10 isn't CGI.pm, we're probably okay.

 * Just put in another goto, and then it'll be readable.

 * I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?

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

 * print rand rand rand 1, '\n';       # interesting distribution

 * : I could understand principles of Perl source in 2-3 days [. . .]

Gee, it took me about eleven years.

 * There's often more than one correct thing.
There's often more than one right thing.
There's often more than one obvious thing.

 * I don't believe I've ever cuddled my elses.

 * I've always maintained a cordial dislike for indent, because it's usually
right.

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

 * The way I see it, if you declare something portable, you'll always be wrong, and if you declare it non-portable, you'll always be right.

 * Perhaps you should compile your Perl with long doubles one of these megaseconds.

 * : Why Bible quotes exclusively? What happened to the Eastern religions?<BR>
I'm still working on the Unicode mods.

 * Maybe we should take a clue from FTP and put in an option like 'print hash marks on every 1024 iterations'.

 * And besides, if Perl really takes off in the Windows space, I think the rest of us would just as soon have a double-agent within ActiveState.

 * The court finds everyone to be in contempt (including himself :-), and orders everyone sentenced to five years hard labor. (Working on Perl, of course.)

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

 * I view the JVM as just another architecture that Perl ought to be ported to. (That, and the Underwood typewriter...)

 * 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.

 * It's, uh, pseudo code. Yeah, that's the ticket...
[...]
And 'unicode' is pseudo code for $encoding.

 * : What do people think?
What, do people think?

 * Well, sure, I explicitly mentioned 'vtables' last time I brought this up. But a single pointer is fairly paltry, as tables go.

 * I dunno. Perhaps you should be happy that I have a policy of refraining from grumbling about handicapped operating systems.

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

 * On the plus side, it's a lot easier in general to find /usr/include than cpp.

 * Psychotics are consistently inconsistent. The essence of sanity is to be inconsistently inconsistent.

 * That which hits the fan tends to get flung in all directions.

 * If this were Ada, we'd simply doc it as 'erroneous'.

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

 * One operator is no big deal. That can be fixed in a jiffy.

 * In Clintonese, that would be 'You are free to infer that I was saying that.'

 * Would you trust the linguistic intuitions of someone who has been studying Latin or Greek for three days?

 * But I know what's important to me, and what isn't. And I think I know what people can get used to, and what they can even learn to like.  (It just takes some people longer than others. :-)

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

 * Orthogonality for orthogonality's sake is not something I'm keen on.

 * Must be a different Larry Wall. There are at least 137 of us in the U.S.

 * Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry.

 * That is a known bug in 5.00550. Either an upgrade or a downgrade will fix it.

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

 * The Golden Gate wasn't our fault either, but we still put a bridge across it.

 * It should be illegal to yell 'Y2K' in a crowded economy.

2003

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

 * : No comment, since this is still hovering (see Larry's reply).

Flutter, flutter.

 * We don't have enough parallel universes to allow all uses of all junction types--in the absence of quantum computing the combinatorics are not in our favor...

 * Accidental stacks considered harmful.

 * I try not to confuse roles and traits in my own life. Being the Perl god is a role.  Being a stubborn cuss is a trait.

 * 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...

 * I think I'm happier with that. $rubyometer += 0.3 or so.

Source code
Quotations come from the source code to Perl version 4. Some may be present in more recent versions as well.

 * <tt>double value;               /* or your money back! */
short changed;               /* so triple your money back! */</tt>

 * <tt>/* now make a new head in the exact same spot */</tt>

 * <tt>#define NULL 0          /* silly thing is, we don't even use this */</tt>

 * <tt>#define SIGILL 6        /* blech */</tt>

 * <tt>if (rsfp = mypopen('/bin/mail root','w')) {    /* heh, heh */</tt>

 * <tt>/* And you'll never guess what the dog had */
/*  in its mouth... */</tt>

 * <tt>break;                         /* don't do magic till later */</tt>

 * <tt>stab_val(stab)->str_nok = 1;   /* what a wonderful hack! */</tt>

 * <tt>tmps_base = tmps_max;               /* protect our mortal string */</tt>

 * <tt>pos += screamnext[pos] /* does this goof up anywhere? */</tt>

 * <tt>str->str_pok |= SP_FBM;                    /* deep magic */
s = (unsigned char*)(str->str_ptr);         /* deeper magic */</tt>

The  script in the Perl source code is generated by a tool called Metaconfig, which was also used in a number of Larry Wall's other programs.

 * <tt>echo 'Congratulations. You aren't running Eunice.</tt>

 * <tt>echo 'Hmmm...you don't have Berkeley networking in libc.a...'
echo 'but the Wollongong group seems to have hacked it in.</tt>

 * <tt>echo 'ICK, NOTHING WORKED!!! You may have to diddle the includes.';;</tt>

 * <tt>echo $package has manual pages available in source form.
echo 'However, you don't have nroff, so they're probably useless to you.</tt>

 * <tt>echo 'Your stdio isn't very std.'</tt>

 * [End of diatribe. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming...]

 * OOPS! You naughty creature!  You didn't run Configure with sh! I will attempt to remedy the situation by running sh for you...

 * That means I'll have to use $ans to suppress newlines now.
Life is ridiculous.

 * 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.

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

 * Your csh still thinks true is false. Write to your vendor today and tell them that next year Configure ought to 'rm /bin/csh' unless they fix their blasted shell.

Other files

 * <tt>/* we have tried to make this normal case as abnormal as possible */</tt>
 * cmd.c.

 * <tt>s = (char*)(long)retval;               /* ouch */</tt>
 * doio.c.

 * <tt>signal(i, SIG_DFL); /* crunch, crunch, crunch */</tt>
 * doarg.c.

 * <tt>if (instr(buf,sys_errlist[errno])) /* you don't see this */</tt>
 * eval.c.

 * <tt>/* dbmrefcnt--; */     /* doesn't work, rats */</tt>
 * hash.c.

 * <tt>#else /* !STDSTDIO */    /* The big, slow, and stupid way */</tt>
 * str.c.

 * <tt>/* This bit of chicanery makes a unary function followed by a parenthesis into a function with one argument, highest precedence. */</tt>
 * toke.c

Documentation

 * Be consistent.
 * In the perl man page.

 * Does the same as the system call of that name. If you don't know what it does, don't worry about it.
 * In the perl man page regarding chroot(2).

 * 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.
 * In the perl man page.

 * Help save the world!
 * In README

 * If you want your program to be readable, consider supplying the argument.
 * In the perl man page.

 * In general, they do what you want, unless you want consistency.
 * In the perl man page.

 * Okay, that's definitely enough hype.
 * In the perl man page.

 * Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.
 * In the perl man page.

 * Remember though that
THERE IS NO GENERAL RULE FOR CONVERTING A LIST INTO A SCALAR.
 * In the perl man page.

 * The autodecrement is not magical.
 * In the perl man page.

 * *** The previous line contains the naughty word '$&'.\n
if /(ibm|apple|awk)/;     # :-)
 * In the perl man page.

 * When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi.
 * In the perl man page.

"2nd State of the Onion"
Taken from the transcript of the talk.

On Jon Postel's robustness principle applied to human communication:
 * 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 thing is that people themselves are not willing to be strict in how they speak, and liberal in how they listen. You'd think that would also be obvious. Instead, we're taught to express ourselves.

"3rd State of the Onion"
Taken from the transcript of the talk.

 * But I'm not here to talk about postmodernism. I tried to do that last spring, and afterwards I was thoroughly deconstructed by the deconstructionists for attempting to deconstruct deconstructionism. At least, that's the construction I put on their construction of it. I was talking about postmodern culture, and they thought I was talking about postmodern literature. Not at all the same thing!

"Present Continuous - Future Perfect"
Taken from the transcript of the talk.

 * And C was good at something I like to call manipulexity, that is the manipulation of complex things. While shell was good at something else which I call whipuptitude, the aptitude for whipping things up.

 * So... Perhaps the Perl 6 slogan should be "All Your Paradigms Are Belong To Us". We'll get to that.

 * I simultaneously believe that languages are wonderful and awful. You have to hold both of those. Ugly things can be beautiful. And beautiful can get ugly very fast. You know, take Lisp. You know, it's the most beautiful language in the world. At least up until Haskell came along. (laughter) But, you know, every program in Lisp is just ugly. I don't figure how that works.

 * Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.
 * "We've got to start over from scratch" - Well, that's almost any academic language you find.
 * "English phrases" - Well, that's Cobol. You know, cargo cult English. (laughter)
 * "Text processing doesn't matter much" - Fortran.
 * "Simple languages produce simple solutions" - C.
 * "If I wanted it fast, I'd write it in C" - That's almost a direct quote from the original awk page.
 * "I thought of a way to do it so it must be right" - That's obviously PHP. (laughter and applause)
 * "You can build anything with NAND gates" - Any language designed by an electrical engineer. (laughter)
 * "This is a very high level language, who cares about bits?" - The entire scope of fourth generation languages fell into this... problem.
 * "Users care about elegance" - A lot of languages from Europe tend to fall into this. You know, Eiffel.
 * "The specification is good enough" - Ada.
 * "Abstraction equals usability" - Scheme. Things like that.
 * "The common kernel should be as small as possible" - Forth.
 * "Let's make this easy for the computer" - Lisp. (laughter)
 * "Most programs are designed top-down" - Pascal. (laughter)
 * "Everything is a vector" - APL.
 * "Everything is an object" - Smalltalk and its children. (whispered:) Ruby. (laughter)
 * "Everything is a hypothesis" - Prolog. (laughter)
 * "Everything is a function" - Haskell. (laughter)
 * "Programmers should never have been given free will" - Obviously, Python. (laughter).

 * How do you type it? With your keyboard.

The State of the Onion 10
Taken from The State of the Onion 10

 * If there's a particular problem that Perl is trying to solve, it's the basic fact that all programming languages suck. Sort of the concept of original sin, applied to programming languages.
 * There are a lotta computer languages out there doing drugs.

The State of the Onion 11
Taken from The State of the Onion 11 ("Programming is Hard. Let's Go Scripting").

 * 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, but a program is what you give the audience. That Ada was one sharp lady...
 * I started out as a BASIC programmer. Some people would say that I'm permanently damaged. Some people are undoubtedly right... But I'm not going to apologize for that. All language designers have their occasional idiosyncracies. I'm just better at it than most.
 * 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.
 * Is LISP a candidate for a scripting language? While you can certainly write things rapidly in it, I cannot in good conscience call LISP a scripting language. By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere mortals... And, of course, mere mortals have never really forgiven LISP for not catering to them.
 * 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.

Larry Wall Speaks at Google (2008)
Video on YouTube.

 * 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. (final words of the video).

IRC
Note: On IRC, Wall uses the nickname "TimToady" (the phonetic equivalent of TIMTOWTDI, which are the initials of the Perl Motto "There is More Than One Way to Do it").

<TimToady> TimToady's Lament: The pain in reign falls mainly in the 'splain.

Freenode's #perl6 on 26 February, 2007. Source.

Other

 * [Boxed] Multiple bouncing balls in a box are a metaphor for community. Notice how the escaping balls explode. This is what happens to people who move from Perl to Ruby.
 * "The State of the Onion", perl.com, 2004-08-18
 * In reference to the boxed screensaver that comes with.

 * ...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.
 * ibid.

 * The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.
 * From the glossary of the first Programming Perl book.

 * The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other.
 * Message-ID <20050516005559.GC26184@wall.org>, to perl6-language mailing-list.

 * There's really no way to fix this and still keep Perl pathologically eclectic.
 * Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant, Programming Perl, third edition, section 3.10.

 * …I also discovered Larry's First Law of Language Redesign: Everyone wants the colon.
 * "Apocalypse 1: The Ugly, the Bad, and the Good", perl.com, 2001-04-02

 * Larry's 2nd Law of Language Redesign: Larry gets the colon.
 * "Apocalypse 5: Regular Expressions", perl.com, 2001-06-04

 * When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct?
 * "Perl, the First Postmodern Computer Language", perl.com, 1999-03-09

 * Jesse Vincent: My dog is Web 2.0. Prove me wrong. Larry: Does your dog have a long tail? Damian Conway: If you enjoyed these practices, find 245 more like this in this book. Larry: Does your dog have a long tail?
 * During sessions of YAPC::Asia::2006

 * Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible.
 * Amazon.com Interview: Larry Wall.

 * As for whether Perl 6 will replace Perl 5, yeah, probably, in about 40 years or so.
 * "Developers can unwrap Perl 6 on Christmas", Infoworld, 2015-12-21

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Larry Wall


text:
User:Shizhao

chinese wikipedia:user:shizhao

title: User:Shizhao


text:
Soichiro Honda

Soichiro Honda (本田宗一郎 Honda Sōichirō; November 17, 1906 – August 5, 1991) was a Japanese industrialist born in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka, Japan. He founded Honda Motor Company.

Quotes

 * Success can only be achieved through repeated failure and introspection...
 * Source: Unknown
 * We must tighten the nut! We are selling motorcycles not clothes!
 * Source: Davis, W. (1991) "The Innovators", in Henry, J. and Walker, D. Managing Innovation, London, Sage
 * In the future, there will be just a half dozen car companies. And Morgan.
 * Source: Unknown

title: Soichiro Honda