Larry Wall Quotes

As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language.

The young think they are immortal, and are determined to prove otherwise.

Odd that we think definitions are definitive.

I think I'm likely to be certified before Perl is ...

Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context.

Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable.

When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.

Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.

And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is

I think I'll side with the pissheads on this one.

It's certainly easy to calculate the average attendance for Perl conferences.

I'm afraid my gut level reaction is basically, proceed is cute, but cute doesn't cut it in the emergency room.

While I have historically been a late worker, you know, sometimes I even like to get up early and see what's happened in the few hours of the night and then I often take a nap in the middle of the day just to sort of make up for stretching my day out.

If you and I always agree, then one of us is redundant.

Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible.

I wouldn't ever write the full sentence myself, but then, I never use goto either.

The overall intent is to make everyone sufficiently happy (or in some cases, insufficiently unhappy).

You need to go and find someone to teach you the rudiments of irrational discourse.

In general, they do what you want, unless you want consistency.

The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer.

Being famous has its benefits, but fame isn't one of them.

That which hits the fan tends to get flung in all directions.

Are you perchance running on a 64-bit machine?

And in the limiting case where the optimizer is completely broken because it's not implemented yet, we get to work around that too. Optionally ...

Somebody out there is going to do something that's far more surprising than anything that I would do. I was surprised by the whole web thing in the first place.

Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.

I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident.

If you're a large corporation, you can afford to pay the money to register patents, but if you're an individual like me, you can't.

Obviously I was either onto something, or on something.

I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?

As someone pointed out, you could have an attribute that says 'optimize the heck out of this routine', and your definition of heck would be a parameter to the optimizer.

The computer should be doing the hard work. That's what it's paid to do, after all.

I'm definitely a night owl. I get going about the time my wife crashes and goes to bed. And in some sense, I've had to learn to be more of a cat napper in recent years because Perl development, Perl design and development, has become a worldwide phenomenon - not just mailing lists, but RSC channels, Twitter even. This all happens 24 hours a day. And people come up with questions at any time of the day or night.

I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it.

There is, however, a strange, musty smell in the air that reminds me of something ... hmm ... yes ... I've got it ... there's a VMS nearby, or I'm a Blit.

To be a good artist, you have to serve the work of art and allow it to be what it is supposed to be.

But the possibility of abuse may be a good reason for leaving capabilities out of other computer languages, it's not a good reason for leaving capabilities out of Perl .

Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.

This does not mean that some of us should not want, in a rather dispassionate sort of way, to put a bullet through csh's head.

Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.

Many computer scientists have fallen into the trap of trying to define languages like George Orwell's Newspeak, in which it is impossible to think bad thoughts. What they end up doing is killing the creativity of programming.

You want it in one line? Does it have to fit in 80 columns?

There ain't nothin' in this world that's worth being a snot over.

For the sake of argument I'll ignore all your fighting words.

You can't change the past. You can't even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives.

All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory ...

At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.

Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry.

This job of playing God is a little too big for me. Nevertheless, someone has to do it, so I'll try my best to fake it.

And besides, if Perl really takes off in the Windows space, I think the rest of us would just as soon have a double-agent within ActiveState.

But I know what's important to me, and what isn't. And I think I know what people can get used to, and what they can even learn to like. (It just takes some people longer than others.

The whole history of computers is rampant with cheerleading at best and bigotry at worst.

I am not a sort of person who wants to run a company.

The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.

And I don't like doing silly things (except on purpose).

We're really serious about reinventing everything that needs reinventing.

The trouble with being quoted a lot is that it makes other people think you're quoting yourself when in fact you're merely repeating yourself.

I talked about becoming stupid, but I've always been stupid. Fortunately I've been just smart enough to realize that I'm stupid.

The world has become a larger place. The universe has been expanding, and Perl's been expanding along with the universe.

Orthogonality for orthogonality's sake is not something I'm keen on.

It's easier to make up sayings people like to hear than sayings they like to heed.

I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'.

Real theology is always rather shocking to people who already think they know what they think. I'm still shocked myself.

Even the White House has a press agent.

I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.

To Perl , or not to Perl, that is the kvetching.

It's easy to solve the halting problem with a shotgun.

Save it for my unauthorized autobiography.

I've had to learn kind of sense when the questions would be coming and be ready to handle them. There's a lot of education and reiteration that happens on these online channels and sometimes it's tempting to just say, "Well, just go and read the documentation," but you know, people appreciate being led along and taught and mentored.

Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something.

If any ideology is so serious that you can't have fun while you're doing it, it's probably too serious.

Sometimes I wish I could put an expiration date on my quotes.

The only reason [not to use] perl is that some sysadmins don't allow software that they didn't pay for. By all means, let them send me money if it makes them feel better.

Computer programming is really a lot like writing a recipe. If you've read a recipe, you know what the structure of a recipe is, it's got some things up at the top that are your ingredients, and below that, the directions for how to deal with those ingredients.

Maybe we should take a clue from FTP and put in an option like 'print hash marks on every 1024 iterations'.

Let us be charitable, and call it a misleading feature

Perl has a long tradition of working around compilers.

The problem with using C++ ... is that there's already a strong tendency in the language to require you to know everything before you can do anything.

When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi.

Think of prototypes as a funny markup language
the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine.

It's there as a sop to former Ada programmers.

I don't like this official/unofficial distinction. It sound, er, officious.

The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.

I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.

I don't believe I've ever cuddled my elses.

Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.

Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to pay another nickel. But hey! You only feel 5 cents poorer each time.

I try not to confuse roles and traits in my own life. Being the Perl god is a role. Being a stubborn cuss is a trait.

Well, you can implement a Perl peek() with unpack('P', ... ). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity.

It would be possible to optimize some forms of goto, but I haven't bothered.

I want to see people using Perl to glue things together creatively, not just technically but also socially.

We are so Post-Modern that we don't realize how Post-Modern we are anymore.

I'm sorry, but you just made me lose my sense of humor, which is deeply regrettable.

Just don't create a file called.

Historically speaking, the presence of wheels in Unix has never precluded their reinvention.

Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism. More fun, too. Ask any mitochondria.

I've decided I don't want to be a manager. Every time you try to be responsive to your employees, they say you're being reactive and not proactive. And when you try to be proactive, they accuse you of being capricious and arbitrary. So I don't wanna be a manager ...

When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct?

Portability should be the default.

(To someone at New York University) If you consistently take an antagonistic approach, however, people are going to start thinking you're from New York.