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 particular place.

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 language. But let's not go there.

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 Europe. I didn't actually make it all the way through; I was like one or two salons from the end and I was standing there and here was a piano that had belonged to Leopold Mozart. And the piano that Brahms used for practicing. And the piano that Haydn had in his house.

And I had this little epiphany that the reason that I was having trouble finding another software project to get excited about was not that I was having trouble finding a project. It was that I wasn't excited about software anymore. As crazy as it may seem now, a lot of my motivation for going into software in the first place was that I thought you could actually make the world a better place by doing it. I don't believe that anymore. Not really. Not in the same way.

This little lightning flash happened and all of a sudden I had the feeling that the way—well, not the way to change the world for the better, but the way to contribute something to the world that might last more than a few years was to do music. That was the moment when I decided that I was going to take a deep breath and walk away from what I'd been doing for 50 years.

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, so I thought I could do better. That's the way kids think. It all seems rather dreamlike now.

Certainly at the time that I started programming, and even up into the 1980s, computer technology was really associated with the corporate world. And my personal politics were quite anticorporate. The kind of computing that I've always worked on has been what today we would call personal computing, interactive computing. I think part of my motivation was the thought that if you could get computer power into the hands of a lot of people, that it might provide some counterweight to corporate power.

I never in my wildest dreams would have predicted the evolution of the Internet. And I never would've predicted the degree to which corporate influence over the Internet has changed its character over time. I would've thought that the Internet was inherently uncontrollable, and I no longer think that. China shows that you can do it pretty effectively.

And I think there's a good chance that if Microsoft plays its cards right, they will have a lock on the Internet. I'm sure they would love to, but I think they might be smart enough to see the path from where they are to having what effectively is control of essentially all the software that gets used on the Internet.

So I'm not really much of an optimist about the future of computing. To be perfectly honest, that's one of the reasons why it wasn't hard for me to get out. I mean, I saw a world that was completely dominated by an unethical monopolist, and I didn't see much of a place for me in it.