Larry Wall (creator of "Perl" programming language)in September, 1993:

...Perl was created for someone like you, by someone like you,with the collaboration of many other someone like you. The Magic of perl was sewn together, stitch by stitch and swatch by swatch, around the rather peculiar shape of you psyche. If you think pearl is a little bit odd, perhaps that's why.(...)

"Do one thing and do it well" was the rallying cry, and with one stroke, shell programmers were condemned to a life of muttering and counting beads on strings (which in these latter days come to be known as pipelines). This was when I made my small contribution to saving the world. I was rolling some of those very beads around in my fingers one day and pondering the hopelessness (and haplessness) of my existence, when it occured to me that it might be interesting to melt dowm some of those mystical beads and see what would happen to their Magic if I made a single, slightly larger bead out of them. So I fired up the old Bunsen burner, picked out some of my favorite beads, and let them melt together however they would. And lo! the new Magic was more powerful than the sum of its parts and parcels.

That's odd, thought I. Why should it be, that the Sedulous Bead of Regular Expressions, when bonded together with the Shellacious Bead of Gnostic Interrpolation, and the Awkward bead of Simple Data Technology, should produce more Magic, pound for pound, then they do when strung out in strings? I said to myself could it be that the beads can exchange power with each other throgh that skinny little string? Could the pipeline be holding back the flow of information, much as wine doth resist flowing through the neck of Doctor von Neumann's famous bottle?

This demanded (of me) more scrunity (of it).

So I melted that larger bead together with a few more of my favorite beads, and the same thing happened, only more so. It was practically a combinatorial explosion of potential incantations: the Basic Bead of Output Formats and the Lispery Bead of Dynamic Scoping bonded themselves with the C-rationalized Bead of Operators Galore, and together they put forth a brilliant pulse of power that spread to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. That message cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Obviously I was either onto something, or on something.

I then gathered my courage about me and showed my new magical bead to some of you, and you then began to give me your favorite beads to add in as well. The Magic grew yet more powerful, as yet more synergy was imbued in the silly thing. It was as the Computational Elementals summoned by each bead were cooperating on your behalf to solve your problems for you. Why the sudden peace on earth and good will toward mentality? Perhaps it was because the beads were your favorite beads? Perhaps it was because I'm just a good bead picker? (...)