Well, you can implement a Perl peek() with unpack('P',...). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity.

Younger hackers are hard to classify. They're probably just as diverse as the old hackers are. We're all over the map.

At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.

Portability should be the default.

I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.

Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry.

The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.

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

Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.

Life is essentially an endless series of problems. The solution to one problem is merely the creation of another.

We are not, and never need be, alone.

If you play well on the field, everything will take care of itself.

It takes a certain courage and a certain greatness even to be truly base.

I am such a big fan of Batman.

If you do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. If what you are doing is not working, do something else.

My biggest surprise is probably the level of involvement of all the artists [in Valerian] who participated at every level.

I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops.

It is by serving God and others that we store up heavenly treasures. Everyone gains; no one loses.

Fiction basically is a form of gossip where you want to enter other people's lives, the lives of people you don't know, and you want to know what's going to happen to them.