Larry Wall Quotes

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

I still drive my 1977 Honda Accord. The paint is almost all worn off. It's still running.

Psychotics are consistently inconsistent. The essence of sanity is to be inconsistently inconsistent.

Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.

Odd that we think definitions are definitive.

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

The potential of greater good goes right along with the potential for greater evil.

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.

"Lurking" is one metaphor that the Omniscience has allowed us to borrow.

It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.

I'm just paid to do whatever I want to do. Some of the time it's development, and some of the time it's just goofing off.

Natural languages generally are not designed by humans, they're just designed by the participants and you say something new and somebody else says, "Oh, that's a cool way to say it," and the next thing you know, everyone is saying it because it's shiny.

Even if you aren't in doubt, consider the mental welfare of the person who has to maintain the code after you, and who will probably put parens in the wrong place.

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

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

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

So please don't think I have a 'down' on the MVS people. I'm just pulling off their arms to beat other people over the head with.

Life gets boring, someone invents another necessity, and once again we turn the crank on the screwjack of progress hoping that nobody gets screwed.

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

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.

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

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

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.

There's a saying in the software design industry: "Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two."

I note that the Python folks still think they like JPython. I wonder how long that will last?

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.

Many days I don't write any code at all, and some days I spend all day writing code.

It is my job in life to travel all roads, so that some may take the road less travelled, and others the road more travelled, and all have a pleasant day.

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

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

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

I'm a great believer in visual distinctions.

Must be a different Larry Wall. There are at least 137 of us in the U.S.

There's many scripting languages in the world, Perl is a little bit special because it is based more on some ideas from the way natural languages work.

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.

Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned the language, it's more expressive.

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

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

Well, hey, let's just make everything into a closure, and then we'll have our general garbage collector, installed by 'use less memory'.

You can never entirely stop being what you once were. That's why it's important to be the right person today, and not put it off till tomorrow.

All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory.

True greatness is measured by how much freedom you give to others, not by how much you can coerce others to do what you want.