Larry Wall
Programmer, best known as the creator of the Perl programming language.
That gets us out of deciding how to spell Reg[eE]xp?|RE . . . Of course, then we have to decide what ref $re returns... :-)
Is LISP a candidate for a scripting language? While you can certainly write things rapidly in it, I cannot in good conscience call LISP a scripting language. By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere mortals... And, of course, mere mortals have never really forgiven LISP for not catering to them.
And C was good at something I like to call manipulexity, that is the manipulation of complex things. While shell was good at something else which I call whipuptitude, the aptitude for whipping things up.
Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose.
I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?
If this were Ada, we'd simply doc it as 'erroneous'.
It would be possible to optimize some forms of goto, but I haven't bothered.
It's hard to tune heavily tuned code. :-)
I want to see people using Perl to glue things together creatively, not just technically but also socially.
Okay, that's definitely enough hype.
: - cut in regexps
I don't think we reached consensus on that. We're still backtracking...
If I don't document something, it's usually either for a good reason, or a bad reason. In this case it's a good reason. :-)
That could certainly be done, but I don't want to fall into the Forth trap, where every running Forth implementation is really a different language.
Besides, including <std_ice_cubes.h> is a fatal error on machines that don't have it yet. Bad language design, there... :-)
...this does not mean that some of us should not want, in a rather dispassionate sort of way, to put a bullet through csh's head.
There are many times when you want it to ignore the rest of the string just like atof() does. Oddly enough, Perl calls atof(). How convenient. :-)
The following two statements are usually both true:
There's not enough documentation.
There's too much documentation.
...Then you start building things like the Berlin wall to keep people inside your community. In anthropological terms, that's tribalism. A tribal Perl programmer might say, "If you leave the Perl tribe to go and join the Python tribe, we will hunt you down, cook you, and eat you." Or if you join the Ruby tribe, you will explode. By and large, I am not in favor of tribalism. Except for my tribe, of course.
Accidental stacks considered harmful.