Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.

I was raised a musician and I played classic music, violin, in orchestras and music comedy theaters, I have music running around in my head all the time, and if I hear music that's too interesting, I have to pay attention to it.

Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable.

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

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

When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.

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.