Top 100 Larry Wall Quotes
#1. 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.
Larry Wall
#2. I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident.
Larry Wall
#3. As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be visually distinct.
Larry Wall
#4. 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.
Larry Wall
#5. (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.
Larry Wall
#6. Are you perchance running on a 64-bit machine?
Larry Wall
#7. I'm never satisfied because I've been always interested in too many things and I always want to do everything at once.
Larry Wall
#8. Perhaps you should compile your Perl with long doubles one of these megaseconds.
Larry Wall
#9. There is no schedule. We are all volunteers, so we get it done when we get it done. Perl 5 still works fine, and we plan to take the right amount of time on Perl 6.
Larry Wall
#10. Perl programming is an *empirical* science!
Larry Wall
#11. Well, hey, let's just make everything into a closure, and then we'll have our general garbage collector, installed by 'use less memory'.
Larry Wall
#12. It would be possible to optimize some forms of goto, but I haven't bothered.
Larry Wall
#13. Obviously I was either onto something, or on something.
Larry Wall
#14. 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.
Larry Wall
#15. 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.
Larry Wall
#16. 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.
Larry Wall
#17. The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other.
Larry Wall
#18. Reserve your abuse for your true friends.
Larry Wall
#19. I 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 Wall
#20. The computer should be doing the hard work. That's what it's paid to do, after all.
Larry Wall
#21. The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.
Larry Wall
#22. 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.
Larry Wall
#23. Not that I have anything much against redundancy. But I said that already.
Larry Wall
#24. 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.
Larry Wall
#25. You can prove anything by mentioning another computer language.
Larry Wall
#26. Perhaps I'm missing the gene for making enemies.
Larry Wall
#27. I think I'm likely to be certified before Perl is ...
Larry Wall
#28. There's some entertainment value in watching people juggle nitroglycerin.
Larry Wall
#29. 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.
Larry Wall
#30. Many days I don't write any code at all, and some days I spend all day writing code.
Larry Wall
#31. The whole intent of Perl 5's module system was to encourage the growth of Perl culture rather than the Perl core.
Larry Wall
#32. The whole history of computers is rampant with cheerleading at best and bigotry at worst.
Larry Wall
#33. 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.
Larry Wall
#34. Odd that we think definitions are definitive.
Larry Wall
#35. Perl has a long tradition of working around compilers.
Larry Wall
#36. I won't mention any names, because I don't want to get sun4's into trouble ...
Larry Wall
#37. Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.
Larry Wall
#39. 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.
Larry Wall
#40. Laziness is a programmers main virtue.
Larry Wall
#41. We are so Post-Modern that we don't realize how Post-Modern we are anymore.
Larry Wall
#42. 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
Larry Wall
#43. 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.
Larry Wall
#44. 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.
Larry Wall
#45. To ordinary folks, conversion is not always automatic. It's something that may or may not require explicit assistance. See Billy Graham.
Larry Wall
#46. Must be a different Larry Wall. There are at least 137 of us in the U.S.
Larry Wall
#47. Let us be charitable, and call it a misleading feature
Larry Wall
#48. A Perl program is correct if it gets the job done before your boss fires you.
Larry Wall
#49. 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.
Larry Wall
#50. For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.
Larry Wall
#51. The camel has evolved to be relatively self-sufficient. On the other hand, the camel has not evolved to smell good. Neither has Perl.
Larry Wall
#52. It is easier to port a shell than a shell script.
Larry Wall
#53. Well, I think Perl should run faster than C.
Larry Wall
#54. All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory ...
Larry Wall
#55. 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.
Larry Wall
#56. It's certainly easy to calculate the average attendance for Perl conferences.
Larry Wall
#57. I take time to watch anime. I don't know whether I'm allowed to, but I do it anyway.
Larry Wall
#58. You need to go and find someone to teach you the rudiments of irrational discourse.
Larry Wall
#59. The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer.
Larry Wall
#60. 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.
Larry Wall
#61. I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'.
Larry Wall
#62. 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.
Larry Wall
#63. Psychotics are consistently inconsistent. The essence of sanity is to be inconsistently inconsistent.
Larry Wall
#64. And I don't like doing silly things (except on purpose).
Larry Wall
#65. Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.
Larry Wall
#66. It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.
Larry Wall
#67. Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.
Larry Wall
#68. 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.
Larry Wall
#69. We 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 Wall
#70. Some of modern engineering is necessary to good art. But I think of myself is a cultural artist.
Larry Wall
#71. Orthogonality for orthogonality's sake is not something I'm keen on.
Larry Wall
#72. Well, you know, Hubbard had a bunch of people sworn to commit suicide when he died. So of course he never officially died ...
Larry Wall
#73. The world has become a larger place. The universe has been expanding, and Perl's been expanding along with the universe.
Larry Wall
#74. Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry.
Larry Wall
#75. The 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 Wall
#76. Wow, I'm being shot at from both sides. That means I *must* be right.
Larry Wall
#77. I am not a sort of person who wants to run a company.
Larry Wall
#78. I note that the Python folks still think they like JPython. I wonder how long that will last?
Larry Wall
#79. Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.
Larry Wall
#80. I talked about becoming stupid, but I've always been stupid. Fortunately I've been just smart enough to realize that I'm stupid.
Larry Wall
#81. A good messenger expects to get shot.
Larry Wall
#82. 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.
Larry Wall
#83. I still drive my 1977 Honda Accord. The paint is almost all worn off. It's still running.
Larry Wall
#85. We're really serious about reinventing everything that needs reinventing.
Larry Wall
#86. Real theology is always rather shocking to people who already think they know what they think. I'm still shocked myself.
Larry Wall
#87. Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.
Larry Wall
#88. I want to see people using Perl to glue things together creatively, not just technically but also socially.
Larry Wall
#89. When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi.
Larry Wall
#90. Perl should remain fast and intuitive (to the extent that it is
Larry Wall
#91. 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 .
Larry Wall
#92. Historically speaking, the presence of wheels in Unix has never precluded their reinvention.
Larry Wall
#93. Think of prototypes as a funny markup language
the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine.
Larry Wall
#94. If you write something wrong enough, I'll be glad to make up a new witticism just for you.
Larry Wall
#95. For the sake of argument I'll ignore all your fighting words.
Larry Wall
#96. I think that's easier to read. Pardon me. Less difficult to read.
Larry Wall
#97. Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.
Larry Wall
#98. We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise.
Larry Wall
#99. 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 Wall
#100. You want it in one line? Does it have to fit in 80 columns?
Larry Wall
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