Larry Wall Quotes

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

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

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.

Portability should be the default.

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

Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry.

The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.

Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism. More fun, too. Ask any mitochondria.

Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible.

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

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

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

Laziness is a programmers main virtue.

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?

Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is.

I take time to watch anime. I don't know whether I'm allowed to, but I do it anyway.

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

Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.

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.

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

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

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

Programmers can be lazy.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I wouldn't ever write the full sentence myself, but then, I never use goto either.

One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.

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

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

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.

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

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

Orthogonality for orthogonality's sake is not something I'm keen on.

People get annoyed when you try to debug them.

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