Larry Wall Quotes

233 Sourced Quotes

Well, hey, let's just make everything into a closure, and then we'll have our general garbage collector, installed by 'use less memory'.

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

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

Larry Wall
Maybe we should take a clue from FTP and put in an option like 'print hash marks on every 1024 iterations'.

Larry Wall
I won't mention any names, because I don't want to get sun4's into trouble...

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

Larry Wall
Y'know, there are other possibilities if we assume that filenames are UTF-8... yikes... wait, put down that meat cleaver! Aieeee!!!

Larry Wall
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...

Larry Wall
…I also discovered Larry's First Law of Language Redesign: Everyone wants the colon.

Larry Wall
To ordinary folks, conversion is not always automatic. It's something that may or may not require explicit assistance. See Billy Graham.

Larry Wall
I don't like your I-can-use-anything-as-an-adjective attitude.

Larry Wall
> (It's sorta like sed, but not. It's sorta like awk, but not. etc.)
Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.

Larry Wall
There are probably better ways to do that, but it would make the parser more complex. I do, occasionally, struggle feebly against complexity...

Larry Wall
We didn't put in ^^ because then we'd have to keep telling people what it means, and then we'd have to keep telling them why it doesn't short circuit. :-/

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

Larry Wall
I think you didn't get a reply because you used the terms 'correct' and 'proper', neither of which has much meaning in Perl culture.

Larry Wall
I started out as a BASIC programmer. Some people would say that I'm permanently damaged. Some people are undoubtedly right... But I'm not going to apologize for that. All language designers have their occasional idiosyncracies. I'm just better at it than most.

Larry Wall
That gets us out of deciding how to spell Reg[eE]xp?|RE... Of course, then we have to decide what ref $re returns...

Larry Wall
: - cut in regexps

I don't think we reached consensus on that. We're still backtracking...

Larry Wall
OOPS! You naughty creature! You didn't run Configure with sh! I will attempt to remedy the situation by running sh for you...

Larry Wall
To someone at New York University:
If you consistently take an antagonistic approach, however, people are going to start thinking you're from New York.

Larry Wall
As with all the other proposals, it's basically just a list of words. You can deal with that...

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

Larry Wall
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.

Larry Wall
All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory...

Larry Wall
You have to admit that it's difficult to misplace the Perl sources.

Larry Wall
But I'm not here to talk about postmodernism. I tried to do that last spring, and afterwards I was thoroughly deconstructed by the deconstructionists for attempting to deconstruct deconstructionism. At least, that's the construction I put on their construction of it. I was talking about postmodern culture, and they thought I was talking about postmodern literature. Not at all the same thing!

Larry Wall
You can prove anything by mentioning another computer language.

Larry Wall
When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct?

Larry Wall
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. :-)

Larry Wall