Larry Wall Quotes

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

A Perl program is correct if it gets the job done before your boss fires you.

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

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

Information wants to be useful.

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

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

All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory.

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

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.

To be a good artist, you have to serve the work of art and allow it to be what it is supposed to be.

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

It is my job in life to travel all roads, so that some may take the road less travelled, and others the road more travelled, and all have a pleasant day.

As someone pointed out, you could have an attribute that says 'optimize the heck out of this routine', and your definition of heck would be a parameter to the optimizer.

The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer.

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

The random quantum fluctuations of my brain are historical accidents that happen to have decided that the concepts of dynamic scoping and lexical scoping are orthogonal and should remain that way.

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

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

As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be visually distinct.

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

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

I'm just paid to do whatever I want to do. Some of the time it's development, and some of the time it's just goofing off.

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

You can never entirely stop being what you once were. That's why it's important to be the right person today, and not put it off till tomorrow.

But you have to allow a little for the desire to evangelize when you think you have good news.

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

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.

It's easy to solve the halting problem with a shotgun.

Accidental stacks considered harmful.

I'd make people say 'use Fork;' if I thought I could get away with it.

I'm afraid my gut level reaction is basically, proceed is cute, but cute doesn't cut it in the emergency room.

My arthritic pinkies are already starting to ache just thinking about ||||=.

That being said, I think we should immediately deprecate any string concatenation that combines '19' with '99'.

Must be a different Larry Wall. There are at least 137 of us in the U.S.

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.

Even if you aren't in doubt, consider the mental welfare of the person who has to maintain the code after you, and who will probably put parens in the wrong place.

We don't have enough parallel universes to allow all uses of all junction types - in the absence of quantum computing the combinatorics are not in our favor.

Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.

In general, they do what you want, unless you want consistency.

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

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

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

I try not to confuse roles and traits in my own life. Being the Perl god is a role. Being a stubborn cuss is a trait.

Call me bored, but don't call me boring.

Any false value is gonna be fairly boring in Perl, mathematicians notwithstanding.

There is, however, a strange, musty smell in the air that reminds me of something...hmm...yes...I've got it...there's a VMS nearby, or I'm a Blit.

There's a saying in the software design industry: "Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two."

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.

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