I don’t know whether a picture is really worth a thousand words (most pictures seem to be considerably larger these days), but when I give talks about Perl, I often put up a picture (Figure 2-1) showing where some of the ideas in Perl come from.

I usually make a joke about Linguistics not really being the opposite of Common Sense, and then proceed to talk a lot about both of them, with some Computer Science thrown in for good measure. But last December as I was giving a talk in Stockholm, someone asked me how Perl got its inspiration from Art. I was stumped. I mumbled something semi-irrational (always appropriate when discussing Art) and went on to the rest of my talk.