Larry Wall Quotes

233 Sourced Quotes

Well, that's more-or-less what I was saying, though obviously addition is a little more cosmic than the bitwise operators.

Larry Wall
We have tried to make this normal case as abnormal as possible

Larry Wall
People who understand context would be steamed to have someone else dictating how they can call it.

Larry Wall
: But for some things, Perl just isn't the optimal choice.

(yet)

Larry Wall
Besides, REAL computers have a rename() system call.

Larry Wall
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.

Larry Wall
Well, you know, Hubbard had a bunch of people sworn to commit suicide when he died. So of course he never officially died...

Larry Wall
Anyway, there's plenty of room for doubt. It might seem easy enough, but computer language design is just like a stroll in the park.

Jurassic Park, that is.

Larry Wall
And it goes against the grain of building small tools.
Innocent, Your Honor. Perl users build small tools all day long.

Larry Wall
I suppose one could claim that an undocumented feature has no semantics. :-(

Larry Wall
Randal said it would be tough to do in sed. He didn't say he didn't understand sed. Randal understands sed quite well. Which is why he uses Perl.

Larry Wall
Oh, get ahold of yourself. Nobody's proposing that we parse English.

Larry Wall
Wow, I'm being shot at from both sides. That means I *must* be right.

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

Larry Wall
That could certainly be done, but I don't want to fall into the Forth trap, where every running Forth implementation is really a different language.

Larry Wall
There's something to be said for returning the whole syntax tree.

Larry Wall
I simultaneously believe that languages are wonderful and awful. You have to hold both of those. Ugly things can be beautiful. And beautiful can get ugly very fast. You know, take Lisp. You know, it's the most beautiful language in the world. At least up until Haskell came along. (laughter) But, you know, every program in Lisp is just ugly. I don't figure how that works.

Larry Wall
If this were Ada, I suppose we'd just constant fold 1/0 into

die 'Illegal division by zero

Larry Wall
Tcl long ago fell into the Forth trap, and is now trying desperately to extricate itself (with some help from Sun's marketing department).

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

Larry Wall
Print rand rand rand 1, '
'; # interesting distribution

Larry Wall
Not that I'm against sneaking some notions into people's heads upon occasion. (Or blasting them in outright.)

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

Larry Wall
What about WRITING it first and rationalizing it afterwards?

Larry Wall
As usual, I'm overstating the case to knock a few neurons loose, but the truth is usually somewhere in the muddle, uh, middle.

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

Larry Wall
This has been planned for some time. I guess we'll just have to find someone with an exceptionally round tuit.

Larry Wall
Perhaps you should compile your Perl with long doubles one of these megaseconds.

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

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

Larry Wall