Natural languages generally are not designed by humans, they're just designed by the participants and you say something new and somebody else says, "Oh, that's a cool way to say it," and the next thing you know, everyone is saying it because it's shiny.

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

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

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

Many computer scientists have fallen into the trap of trying to define languages like George Orwell's Newspeak, in which it is impossible to think bad thoughts. What they end up doing is killing the creativity of programming.

The problem with using C++ ... is that there's already a strong tendency in the language to require you to know everything before you can do anything.

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