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.

Portability should be the default.

For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.

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.

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?

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.

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.

When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.

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'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.

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.

So many computer languages try to force you into one way of thinking and Perl is very much the opposite of that approach. It's kind of like a, well, sometimes Perl has been called the Swiss army chainsaw of the internet, but it's more like a Swiss army machine shop. It really gives you a lot of tools, some of which are dangerous, but it lets you get your job done very quickly.

Programmers can be lazy.

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

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.

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

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

Basically there's just so much stuff flowing past on the internet now, you have to let most of it go. And I've grown accustomed to the process of not worrying too much about the stuff I'm not getting to, because the important stuff will come back around.

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

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.

A lazy person will try to always find some way to do something; they'll always be looking for ways of doing something faster, more efficiently, and if you really want to control the world, that's a really sort of hubristic notion - excessive pride, the thing that Zeus zaps you for having.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

People get annoyed when you try to debug them.

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.