J. J. Wall Quotes

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?

Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can't even finish my second apple pie.

If you are capable of making good pictures it's immoral not to do so, for whatever reason or excuse you might give.

IT'S a pitfall to have a definition of photography.

That's my main thing: I want to be on the level those guys [Derrick Rose,Russell Westbrook, Kevin Durant] are on.

If you choose the right people for the group, it goes a little bit differently. At the same time, you can't always predict what's going to happen. Success might change people.

The labeling of nociceptors as pain fibers was not an admirable simplification, but an unfortunate trivialization under the guise of simplification.

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

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

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

I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'.

I love music so much, and as long as I got all this enthusiasm and ambition, and passion for this music; as long as I'm having' fun - I'm gonna keep doin' it.

Meaning does not interest me and has almost nothing to do with my decisions or judgments.

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.

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

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.

Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.

Academic sociologists have been trained to conceive of their discipline - sociology - as the scientific study of society, and to remit to the sister discipline of psychology the study of individuals.

It's not how you look, it's how you feel in the dark

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.

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

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

Because image traffic has become so heavy and so continuous, it now seems as if these millions of images came into being by themselves, without the agency of a person.

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.

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

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

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.

Betrayal clearly has its own reward: the small deep human satisfaction of having one up on someone else. It is the psychology of the mistress, and this regime used it as fuel.

The roadblocks to growth and joy come when we forget the bigness of God & instead make people bigger than He is.

With words at your disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

People get annoyed when you try to debug them.

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.

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

Life is like the stock market. Some days you're up. Some days you're down. And some days you feel like something the bull left behind.

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.

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

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