Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.

For the sake of argument I'll ignore all your fighting words.

The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other.

You can't have filenames longer than 14 chars. You can't even think about them!

The computer should be doing the hard work. That's what it's paid to do, after all.

I'm not too concerned about the future of Perl after me, because I see how these people are interacting with each other and even when I'm not there, they are helping each other and solving each other's problems in a way that I could not do, even if I were there.

There's many scripting languages in the world, Perl is a little bit special because it is based more on some ideas from the way natural languages work.