Larry Wall Quotes

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.

A good messenger expects to get shot.

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

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

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

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

I just hope I'm never promoted to the level of my incontinence.

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

Odd that we think definitions are definitive.

Obviously I was either onto something, or on something.

The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other.

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

We can debug relationships, but it's always good policy to consider the people themselves to be features. People get annoyed when you try to debug them.

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

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

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

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

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

Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.

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

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

Let us be charitable, and call it a misleading feature.

Perl should remain fast and intuitive (to the extent that it is :-)

Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

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

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

Just don't create a file called '-rf.'

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

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

You can prove anything by mentioning another computer language.

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.

Are you perchance running on a 64-bit machine?

If someone stinks, view it as a reason to help them, not a reason to avoid them.

Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality.

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

I'm a great believer in visual distinctions.

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

One operator is no big deal. That can be fixed in a jiffy.

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

The autodecrement is not magical.

An initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer.

But I know what's important to me, and what isn't. And I think I know what people can get used to, and what they can even learn to like. (It just takes some people longer than others. :-)

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

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

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.

Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable.

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

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

This job of playing God is a little too big for me. Nevertheless, someone has to do it, so I'll try my best to fake it.