Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism. More fun, too. Ask any mitochondria.

I'm sorry, but you just made me lose my sense of humor, which is deeply regrettable.

And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is.

There's a saying in the software design industry: "Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two."

You can’t change the past. You can’t even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives.

So many computer languages try to force you into one way of thinking and Perl is very much the opposite of that approach. It's kind of like a, well, sometimes Perl has been called the Swiss army chainsaw of the internet, but it's more like a Swiss army machine shop. It really gives you a lot of tools, some of which are dangerous, but it lets you get your job done very quickly.

As someone pointed out, you could have an attribute that says 'optimize the heck out of this routine', and your definition of heck would be a parameter to the optimizer.