I think operating systems work best if they’re free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.

Somebody out there is going to do something that’s far more surprising than anything that I would do. I was surprised by the whole web thing in the first place.

For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.

I think computer science, by and large, is still stuck in the Modern age.

I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.

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

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

If you’re a large corporation, you can afford to pay the money to register patents, but if you’re an individual like me, you can’t.

Many days I don’t write any code at all, and some days I spend all day writing code.

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.

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.

To be a good artist, you have to serve the work of art and allow it to be what it is supposed to be.

We are so Post-Modern that we don’t realize how Post-Modern we are anymore.

I’m never satisfied because I’ve been always interested in too many things and I always want to do everything at once.

I still drive my 1977 Honda Accord. The paint is almost all worn off. It’s still running.

I’m just paid to do whatever I want to do. Some of the time it’s development, and some of the time it’s just goofing off.

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it’s still coming to computer science.

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

Younger hackers are hard to classify. They’re probably just as diverse as the old hackers are. We’re all over the map.

If any ideology is so serious that you can’t have fun while you’re doing it, it’s probably too serious.

Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It’s a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned the language, it’s more expressive.

I am not a sort of person who wants to run a company.

Some of modern engineering is necessary to good art. But I think of myself is a cultural artist.

I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they’ll do very well with it.

Programmers can be lazy.

The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.

I take time to watch anime. I don’t know whether I’m allowed to, but I do it anyway.

I think operating systems work best if they’re free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.

Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.

I want people to use Perl. I want to be a positive ingredient of the world and make my American history. So, whatever it takes to give away my software and get it used, that’s great.

One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.

The world has become a larger place. The universe has been expanding, and Perl’s been expanding along with the universe.

The problems that I really like to solve are our cultural problems.

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

I talked about becoming stupid, but I’ve always been stupid. Fortunately I’ve been just smart enough to realize that I’m stupid.