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Thompson: No. I think it's mostly because the machines have gotten a lot better. Compilers stink. You look at the code coming out of GCC and it's awful. It's really not good. And it's slow; oh, man. I mean, the compiler itself is over 20 passes. It's just monstrously slow, but computers have gotten…

Seibel: You said before that you thought you could make the world a better place with software. How did you think that was going to happen?

Deutsch: Part of it had nothing to do with software per se; it's just that seeing anything around me that's being done badly has always offended me mightily…

I went to this museum, and it's in this long hall of high-ceilinged old salons. And it starts with, I don't know whether they're Neolithic, but very old musical instruments, and it progresses through. Of course, most of their musical instruments are from the last couple of centuries in Western Euro…

Seibel: I think Larry Wall described it as a bowl of oatmeal with fingernail clippings in it.

Deutsch: Well, my description of Perl is something that looks like it came out of the wrong end of a dog. I think Larry Wall has a lot of nerve talking about language design—Perl is an abomination as a …

Deutsch: You'd have to start over. You'd have to throw out all languages that have the concept of a pointer to begin with because there is no such thing as a pointer in the real world. You'd have to come to grips with the fact that information takes space and exists over time and is located at a pa…