Larry Wall Quotes

Even the White House has a press agent.

Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.

What about WRITING it first and rationalizing it afterwards?

Information wants to be useful.

Odd that we think definitions are definitive.

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

I think I'll side with the pissheads on this one.

Take Lisp, you know its the most beautiful language in the world
at least up until Haskell came along.

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

Real theology is always rather shocking to people who already think they know what they think. I'm still shocked myself.

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.

Portability should be the default.

Just don't create a file called.

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

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

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

Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

The whole history of computers is rampant with cheerleading at best and bigotry at worst.

You know, I've got my hands in 30 or 40 different pots simultaneously and so I have a little bit of all of that where I work.

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.

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.

Not that I have anything much against redundancy. But I said that already.

It's easier to make up sayings people like to hear than sayings they like to heed.

The camel has evolved to be relatively self-sufficient. On the other hand, the camel has not evolved to smell good. Neither has Perl.

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?

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

We are so Post-Modern that we don't realize how Post-Modern we are anymore.

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.

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

Younger hackers are hard to classify. They're probably just as diverse as the old hackers are. We're all over the map.

I'm never satisfied because I've been always interested in too many things and I always want to do everything at once.

Well, I think Perl should run faster than C.

Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry.

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.

I think that's easier to read. Pardon me. Less difficult to read.

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

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

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

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

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

And in the limiting case where the optimizer is completely broken because it's not implemented yet, we get to work around that too. Optionally ...

Some of modern engineering is necessary to good art. But I think of myself is a cultural artist.

For the sake of argument I'll ignore all your fighting words.

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

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

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.

Well, you know, Hubbard had a bunch of people sworn to commit suicide when he died. So of course he never officially died ...

Programmers can be lazy.

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.

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.

A good messenger expects to get shot.

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

A journey of a thousand miles continues with the second step.

Being famous has its benefits, but fame isn't one of them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context.

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

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

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

It's appositival, if it's there. And it doesn't have to be there. And it's really obvious that it's there when it's there.

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

We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise.

Obviously I was either onto something, or on something.

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

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

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

I don't believe I've ever cuddled my elses.

I talked about becoming stupid, but I've always been stupid. Fortunately I've been just smart enough to realize that I'm stupid.

It would be possible to optimize some forms of goto, but I haven't bothered.

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

The autodecrement is not magical.

When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi.

Are you perchance running on a 64-bit machine?

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

Besides, REAL computers have a rename() system call.

The problem with using C++ ... is that there's already a strong tendency in the language to require you to know everything before you can do anything.

Not that I'm against sneaking some notions into people's heads upon occasion. (Or blasting them in outright.

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

I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.

And I don't like doing silly things (except on purpose).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The young think they are immortal, and are determined to prove otherwise.

If you and I always agree, then one of us is redundant.