Larry Wall
Programmer, best known as the creator of the Perl programming language.
It is my job in life to travel all roads, so that some may take the road less travelled, and others the road more travelled, and all have a pleasant day.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
There's some entertainment value in watching people juggle nitroglycerin.
: I could understand principles of Perl source in 2-3 days [. . .]
Gee, it took me about eleven years. :-)
Portability should be the default.
(To the extent that anyone but a Prolog programmer can understand X totally. (And to the extent that a Prolog programmer can understand 'cut'. :-))
But the possibility of abuse may be a good reason for leaving capabilities out of other computer languages, it's not a good reason for leaving capabilities out of Perl.
If you write something wrong enough, I'll be glad to make up a new witticism just for you.
Anybody want a binary telemetry frame editor written in Perl?
Oh, wait, that was Randal...nevermind...
Even the White House has a press agent. :-)
But you have to allow a little for the desire to evangelize when you think you have good news.
That means I'll have to use $ans to suppress newlines now.
Life is ridiculous.
To Perl, or not to Perl, that is the kvetching.
Historically Tcl has always stored all intermediate results as strings. (With 8.0 they're rethinking that. Of course, Perl rethought that from the start.)
I wasn't recommending that we make the links for them, only provide them with the tools to do so if they want to take the gamble (or the gambol).
I view the JVM as just another architecture that Perl ought to be ported to. (That, and the Underwood typewriter...)
True, it returns ' ' for false, but ' ' is an even more interesting number than 0.
As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language.
As with all the other proposals, it's basically just a list of words. You can deal with that... :-)