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I want people to use Perl. I want to be a positive ingredient of the world and make my American history. So, whatever it takes to give away my software and get it used, that's great.

Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned the language, it's more expressive.

RSS, as a format and an idea, grew directly out of an internet culture that many people online today know nothing about: Usenet.

In library science school, back in the years of glowing green non-graphical screens and protocols called Archie and Veronica, I wrote Internet documentation.

If I have a bunch of computer lingo that I have no idea what I'm speaking about, I really need to know what I'm talking about.

Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX. The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel - that pretty much the entire Internet runs on - is written in C.

We're systems software people ourselves. We wanted a language to make our lives better.

If someone had protected the HTML language for making Web pages, then we wouldn't have the World Wide Web.

When Usenet was eclipsed by websites in the late 1990s, people from that world - many of them programmers - wanted to bring the freewheeling, amazing discussions of Usenet to the web. And thus, RSS was born.