Larry Wall Quotes

233 Sourced Quotes

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

Larry Wall
Boss: You forgot to assign the result of your map!
Hacker: Dang, I'm always forgetting my assignations...
Boss: And what's that 'goto' doing there?!?
Hacker: Er, I guess my finger slipped when I was typing 'getservbyport'...
Boss: Ah well, accidents will happen. Maybe we should have picked APL.

Larry Wall
The Golden Gate wasn't our fault either, but we still put a bridge across it.

Larry Wall
That means I'll have to use $ans to suppress newlines now.
Life is ridiculous.

Larry Wall
I would estimate that the number of programs it breaks in the world will be less than 10. As long as one of those 10 isn't CGI. pm, we're probably okay.

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

Larry Wall
This bit of chicanery makes a unary function followed by a parenthesis into a function with one argument, highest precedence.

Larry Wall
If you want to program in C, program in C. It's a nice language. I use it occasionally...

Larry Wall
The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.

Larry Wall
Just put in another goto, and then it'll be readable.

Larry Wall
I was about to say, 'Avoid fame like the plague,' but you know, they can cure the plague with penicillin these days.

Larry Wall
I think I'm happier with that. $rubyometer += 0.3 or so.

Larry Wall
Besides, including <std_ice_cubes. h> is a fatal error on machines that don't have it yet. Bad language design, there...

Larry Wall
Remember though that
THERE IS NO GENERAL RULE FOR CONVERTING A LIST INTO A SCALAR.

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

Larry Wall
: I could understand principles of Perl source in 2-3 days [...]

Gee, it took me about eleven years.

Larry Wall
You can't have filenames longer than 14 chars. You can't even think about them!

Larry Wall
It's getting harder and harder to think out loud. One of these days someone's gonna go off and kill Thomas a'Becket for me...

Larry Wall
: No comment, since this is still hovering (see Larry's reply).

Flutter, flutter.

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

Larry Wall
Lispers are among the best grads of the Sweep-It-Under-Someone-Else's-Carpet School of Simulated Simplicity. [Was that sufficiently incendiary?]

Larry Wall
I was trying not to mention backtracking. Which, of course, means that yours is 'righter' than mine, in a theoretical sense.

Larry Wall
In Clintonese, that would be 'You are free to infer that I was saying that.'

Larry Wall
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.

Larry Wall
Piet Van Oostrum: I find this a nice feature but it is not according to the documentation. Or is it a BUG?
Larry Wall: Let's call it an accidental feature.

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

Larry Wall
Well, sure, I explicitly mentioned 'vtables' last time I brought this up. But a single pointer is fairly paltry, as tables go.

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

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

Larry Wall
If this were Ada, we'd simply doc it as 'erroneous'.

Larry Wall