Larry Wall Quotes

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.

One operator is no big deal. That can be fixed in a jiffy.

Just because you're into control doesn't mean you're in control.

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

Let us be charitable, and call it a misleading feature.

You know, I've got my hands in 30 or 40 different pots simultaneously and so I have a little bit of all of that where I work.

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.

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

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

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

Well, you know, Hubbard had a bunch of people sworn to commit suicide when he died. So of course he never officially died.

Younger hackers are hard to classify. They're probably just as diverse as the old hackers are. We're all over the map.

What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against?

As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be visually distinct.

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

You can't have filenames longer than 14 chars. You can't even think about them!

That being said, I think we should immediately deprecate any string concatenation that combines '19' with '99'.

Never put off till tomorrow what you can put off till the day after tomorrow. Like a variant of the song, Tomorrow, only it's more of the idea, the Mexican idea of mañana, you know, [singing] mañana, mañana, I love you, mañana, you're always a day away.

Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality.

Obviously I was either onto something, or on something.

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

Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.

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

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

Well, coffee is my drug of choice, generally, with a little bit of Pepsi here and there, if I need more sugar. But yeah, if I could do intravenous coffee, I would. But I guess that's pretty standard.

Call me bored, but don't call me boring.

One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.

But you have to allow a little for the desire to evangelize when you think you have good news.

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.

Reserve your abuse for your true friends.

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.

A journey of a thousand miles continues with the second step.

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

Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry.

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

Wow, I'm being shot at from both sides. That means I *must* be right.

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.

A good messenger expects to get shot.

Take Lisp, you know its the most beautiful language in the world -- at least up until Haskell came along.

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.

It's appositival, if it's there. And it doesn't have to be there. And it's really obvious that it's there when it's there.

My arthritic pinkies are already starting to ache just thinking about ||||=.

The camel has evolved to be relatively self-sufficient. On the other hand, the camel has not evolved to smell good. Neither has Perl.

Some of modern engineering is necessary to good art. But I think of myself is a cultural artist.

You don't have to know the whole language to use it usefully, you can do baby talk, you can do grown up talk, you can cuss in it, you can write poetry, you can be a playwright, is sort of the idea.

An initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer.

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

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.