Larry Wall Quotes

There's some entertainment value in watching people juggle nitroglycerin.

Laziness is a programmers main virtue.

We don't have enough parallel universes to allow all uses of all junction types - in the absence of quantum computing the combinatorics are not in our favor.

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

I want people to use Perl. I want to be a positive ingredient of the world and make my American history. So, whatever it takes to give away my software and get it used, that's great.

If someone stinks, view it as a reason to help them, not a reason to avoid them.

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.

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.

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

Save it for my unauthorized autobiography.

Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.

The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your resume by a word and a comma.

[Perl] gives you the STDERR filehandle so that your program can make snide comments off to the side while it transforms (or attempts to transform) your input into your output.

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

Don't wear rollerskates to a tug-of-war.

What you'll need most is courage. It is not an easy path that you've set your foot upon.

I'm not too concerned about the future of Perl after me, because I see how these people are interacting with each other and even when I'm not there, they are helping each other and solving each other's problems in a way that I could not do, even if I were there.

I think computer science, by and large, is still stuck in the Modern age.

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

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.

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

Would you trust the linguistic intuitions of someone who has been studying Latin or Greek for three days?

Yes, but I did manage to increase the amount of virginity in the world by that method.

The problems that I really like to solve are our cultural problems.

Perl doesn't have an infatuation with enforced privacy. It would prefer that you stayed out of its living room because you weren't invited, not because it has a shotgun

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?

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

It should be illegal to yell 'Y2K' in a crowded economy.

Perhaps you should compile your Perl with long doubles one of these megaseconds.

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.

The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other.

Even the White House has a press agent.

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

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

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

Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.

Programmers can be lazy.

It is easier to port a shell than a shell script.

For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.

Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.

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

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.

So many computer languages try to force you into one way of thinking and Perl is very much the opposite of that approach. It's kind of like a, well, sometimes Perl has been called the Swiss army chainsaw of the internet, but it's more like a Swiss army machine shop. It really gives you a lot of tools, some of which are dangerous, but it lets you get your job done very quickly.

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

It won't be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all.

I procrastinate, but mostly because there's always too many things to do, and I got the stew in my mind that things do bubble up, so I'll throw things in there and let them stew around. It's sort of like greasing the squeaky wheels in my own brain.

Information wants to be useful.

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