Quotes About Perl

#1. Jed Perl writes precisely and ecstatically. Antoine' s Alphabet is a history and a fairy tale, a work of criticism, and a work of art.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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

Larry Wall

#3. The main languages out of which web applications are built - whether it's Perl or Python or PHP or any of the other languages - those are all open source languages. So the infrastructure of the web is open source ... the web as we know it is completely dependent on open source.

Mitch Kapor

#4. 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

#5. Well, I think Perl should run faster than C.

Larry Wall

#6. 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

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

Larry Wall

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

Larry Wall

#9. Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose.

Larry Wall

#10. Larry Wall's classic Programming Perl described the three programmer's virtues: hubris, laziness, and impatience.

C.J.S. Hayward

#11. 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

#12. 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.

Larry Wall

#13. The world has become a larger place. The universe has been expanding, and Perl's been expanding along with the universe.

Larry Wall

#14. Any false value is gonna be fairly boring in Perl, mathematicians notwithstanding.

Larry Wall

#15. Don't blame Perl. It's the same as in C. IEEE says we have to do this.

Anonymous

#16. 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?

Larry Wall

#17. Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.

Larry Wall

#18. Part of any serious QA is removing Perl code the same way you go over a dilapidated building you inherit to remove chewing gum and duct tape and fix whatever was kept together for real.

Erik Naggum

#19. 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.

Larry Wall

#20. 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

Larry Wall

#21. The court finds everyone to be in contempt (including himself:;, and orders everyone sentenced to five years hard labor. (Working on Perl, of course.

Larry Wall

#22. A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.

Larry Wall

#23. I want to see people using Perl to glue things together creatively, not just technically but also socially.

Larry Wall

#24. Perl should remain fast and intuitive (to the extent that it is

Larry Wall

#25. 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

#26. A lot of the websites built through the 1990s used Perl. The first webmaster of Sun Microsystems coined a wonderful phrase. He said Perl is the duck tape of the Internet - it's this language that people would write all these scripts that make things just work.

Tim O'Reilly

#27. Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.

Larry Wall

#28. I guess there are some things that are so gross you just have to forget, or it'll destroy something within you. Perl is the first such thing I have known.

Erik Naggum

#29. 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.

Larry Wall

#30. Ruby inherited the Perl philosophy of having more than one way to do the same thing. I inherited that philosophy from Larry Wall, who is my hero actually. I want to make Ruby users free. I want to give them the freedom to choose.

Yukihiro Matsumoto

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

Larry Wall

#32. Let's just hope that all the world is run by Bill Gates before the Perl hackers can destroy it.

Erik Naggum

#33. It's not that Perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done.

Erik Naggum

#34. Lief. That's not nice, considering all your sister has done for you," admonished Perl.
"Oh right. How could I forget that she made me bait for a snake, left me on house arrest in Ixia, and smuggled me into the Keep in a coffin.

Maria V. Snyder

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

Larry Wall

#36. 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

#37. Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

Larry Wall

#38. To Perl , or not to Perl, that is the kvetching.

Larry Wall

#39. [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.

Larry Wall

#40. Python is executable pseudocode. Perl is executable line noise.

Bruce Eckel

#41. [Boxed] Multiple bouncing balls in a box are a metaphor for community. Notice how the escaping balls explode. This is what happens to people who move from Perl to Ruby .

Larry Wall

#42. If Perl is the solution, you're solving the wrong problem.

Erik Naggum

#43. I think I'm likely to be certified before Perl is ...

Larry Wall

#44. 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

#45. The whole intent of Perl 5's module system was to encourage the growth of Perl culture rather than the Perl core.

Larry Wall

#46. Perl is like vise grips. You can do anything with it but it is the wrong tool for every job.

Bruce Eckel

#47. Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.

Alan Kay

#48. A Perl program is correct if it gets the job done before your boss fires you.

Larry Wall

#49. [Perl] combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript.

Jamie Zawinski

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

Larry Wall

#51. At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.

Larry Wall

#52. I view the JVM as just another architecture that Perl ought to be ported to. (That, and the Underwood typewriter ...

Larry Wall

#53. What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix.

Erik Naggum

#54. Perl has a long tradition of working around compilers.

Larry Wall

#55. The ultimate laziness is not using Perl. That saves you so much work you wouldn't believe it if you had never tried it.

Erik Naggum

#56. When 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 Wall

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

Larry Wall

#58. As a Jew, I had no desire to challenge my childhood prejudice. But as a teacher, I could not do otherwise.

Sondra Perl

#59. I learned quickly, as I tell my graduate students now, there are no answers in the back of the book when the equipment doesn't work or the measurements look strange.

Martin Lewis Perl

#60. My parents were determined to move into the middle class.

Martin Lewis Perl

#61. Their educations ended with high school - my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants.

Martin Lewis Perl

#62. A parent being called to the school because their child had misbehaved was as serious as a parent being called to the police station because their child had robbed a bank.

Martin Lewis Perl

#63. Naturally, I have compensated in my adult years by owning very large numbers of books.

Martin Lewis Perl

#64. My final remark to young women and men going into experimental science is that they should pay little attention to the speculative physics ideas of my generation. After all, if my generation has any really good speculative ideas, we will be carrying these ideas out ourselves.

Martin L. Perl

#65. I was also interested in chemistry, but my parents were not willing to buy me a chemistry set.

Martin Lewis Perl

#66. My parents regarded school teachers as higher beings, as did many immigrants.

Martin Lewis Perl

#67. There were two free public libraries within walking distance of my home; I remember taking six books home from every visit, the limit set by the library.

Martin Lewis Perl

#68. The remoteness of my parents from the schools, so unfashionable today, was often painful for me, but I learned early to deal with an outside and sometimes hard world.

Martin Lewis Perl

#69. This was good training for research, because large parts of experimental work are sometimes boring or involve the use of skills in which one is not particularly gifted.

Martin Lewis Perl

#70. It was good fortune to be a child during the Depression years and a youth during the war years.

Martin Lewis Perl

#71. Whatever the course, whether the course was boring or interesting to me, whether I was talented in mathematics or not talented in languages, my parents expected A's.

Martin Lewis Perl

#72. About 1900 my parents came to the United States as children from what was then the Polish area of Russia.

Martin Lewis Perl

#73. Going to school and working for good marks, indeed working for very good marks, was a serious business.

Martin Lewis Perl

#74. 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

#75. Natures' curriculum cannot be changed.

Martin Lewis Perl

#76. They wanted me to play more sports because they were acutely sensitive to their children being one hundred percent American, and they believed that all Americans played sports and loved sports.

Martin Lewis Perl

#77. As Jews, their families left Russia to escape the poverty and the antisemitism.

Martin Lewis Perl