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

Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.

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

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

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

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