“A couple of years ago, I ran into someone at a trade show who was representing the NSA (National Security Agency). He mentioned to someone else in passing that he'd written a filter program in Perl, so without telling him who I was, I asked him if I could tell people that the NSA uses Perl. His response was, "Doesn't everyone?" So now I don't tell people the NSA uses Perl. I merely tell people the NSA thinks everyone uses Perl. They should know, after all.”

“The best way to figure out what Perl is used for is to look at the ... Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (the CPAN, for short). ... [Y]ou'll get the impression that Perl has interfaces to almost everything in the world. With a little thought, you may figure out the reason Perl has interfaces to everything is not so much so Perl itself can talk to everything, but so Perl can get everything in the world talking to everything else in the world. The combinatorics are staggering. The very first issue of The Perl Journal ... contained an article entitled 'How Perl Saved the Human Genome Project'. It explains how all the different genome sequencing laboratories used different databases with different formats, and how Perl was used to massage the data into a cohesive whole.”

“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.”

“Perl doesn't have an infatuation with enforced privacy. It would prefer that you stayed out of its living room because you weren't invited, not because it has a shotgun”

“We need to contact NSA, CIA, anybody using initials... and the President!”

“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”

“Fitzpatrick: Back when I was doing Perl-even for people that knew Perl really well-I would recommend MJD's Higher-Order Per!. The book is really fun in that it starts somewhat simple and you're like, "Yeah, yeah, I know what a closure is." And then it just continues to fuck with your head. By the end of the book, you're just blown away.”