[faitswulff]

> I remember when this was switched on. Larry Wall tried it out on the entire spectest suite, and nothing broke (or at most one random thing broke), because basically people already put whitespace around their infix operators.

Larry Wall seems hilariously easy-going for a language BDFL!

[sp332]

He's a linguist and a self-professed post-modernist. He's interested in how people actually use language, and has very little interest in dictating language purity.

[DonHopkins]

Larry Wall is to Linguistics as Deepak Chopra is to Quantum Physics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall

"While in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, Wall and his wife were studying linguistics with the intention of finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and creating a writing system for it. They would then use this new writing system to translate various texts into the language, among them the Bible. Due to health reasons these plans were cancelled, and they remained in the United States, where Larry instead joined the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory after he finished graduate school."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_imperialism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilizing_mission

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quantum_woo