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.
Larry WallAnd don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is.
Larry WallWe all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise.
Larry WallI was raised a musician and I played classic music, violin, in orchestras and music comedy theaters, I have music running around in my head all the time, and if I hear music that's too interesting, I have to pay attention to it.
Larry WallI 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.
Larry WallWe can debug relationships, but it's always good policy to consider the people themselves to be features. People get annoyed when you try to debug them.
Larry WallI'm never satisfied because I've been always interested in too many things and I always want to do everything at once.
Larry WallMost of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.
Larry WallI talked about becoming stupid, but I've always been stupid. Fortunately I've been just smart enough to realize that I'm stupid.
Larry WallI'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.
Larry WallThe way I see it, if you declare something portable, you'll always be wrong, and if you declare it non-portable, you'll always be right.
Larry WallNow, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.
Larry WallThe random quantum fluctuations of my brain are historical accidents that happen to have decided that the concepts of dynamic scoping and lexical scoping are orthogonal and should remain that way.
Larry WallWhen I announced the development of Perl 6, I said it was going to be a community design. I designed Perl, myself. It's limited by my own brain power. So I wanted Perl 6 to be a community design.
Larry WallA lazy person will try to always find some way to do something; they'll always be looking for ways of doing something faster, more efficiently, and if you really want to control the world, that's a really sort of hubristic notion - excessive pride, the thing that Zeus zaps you for having.
Larry WallAs 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.
Larry WallPerl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.
Larry WallThe world has become a larger place. The universe has been expanding, and Perl's been expanding along with the universe.
Larry WallBasically there's just so much stuff flowing past on the internet now, you have to let most of it go. And I've grown accustomed to the process of not worrying too much about the stuff I'm not getting to, because the important stuff will come back around.
Larry WallTo ordinary folks, conversion is not always automatic. It's something that may or may not require explicit assistance. See Billy Graham.
Larry WallIf 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.
Larry Wall