The purpose of human existence is to learn and to understand as much as we can of what came before us, so we can further the sum total of human knowledge in our life.

Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary.

It's not that Perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done.

Getting C programmers to understand that they cause the computer to do less than minimum is intractable. … Ask him why he thinks he should be able to get away with unsafe code, core dumps, viruses, buffer overruns, undetected errors, etc., just because he wants speed.

C being what it is lacks support for multiple return values, so the notion that it is meaningful to pass pointers to memory objects into which any random function may write random values without having a clue where they point, has not been debunked as the sheer idiocy it really is.

Like many older fans of Free Software and Open Source, I have discovered that it is really only free in the sense that the time you spend on it is worthless.

Just getting something to work usually means writing reams of code fast, like a Stephen King novel, but making it maintainable and high-quality code that really expresses the ideas well, is like writing poetry. Art is taking away.