Larry Wall Quotes

233 Sourced Quotes

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

Larry Wall
If you want to see useful Perl examples, we can certainly arrange to have comp. lang. misc flooded with them, but I don't think that would help the advance of civilization.

Larry Wall
I'd put my money where my mouth is, but my mouth keeps moving.

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

Larry Wall
As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language.

Larry Wall
There's often more than one correct thing.
There's often more than one right thing.
There's often more than one obvious thing.

Larry Wall
If you want your program to be readable, consider supplying the argument.

Larry Wall
Tcl tends to get ported to weird places like routers.

Larry Wall
Sometimes we choose the generalization. Sometimes we don't.

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

Larry Wall
There are many times when you want it to ignore the rest of the string just like atof() does. Oddly enough, Perl calls atof(). How convenient.

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

Larry Wall
You tell it that it's indicative by appending $!. That's why we made $! such a short variable name, after all.

Larry Wall
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.

Larry Wall
I wasn't recommending that we make the links for them, only provide them with the tools to do so if they want to take the gamble (or the gambol).

Larry Wall
True, it returns ' ' for false, but ' ' is an even more interesting number than 0.

Larry Wall
People understand instinctively that the best way for computer programs to communicate with each other is for each of the them to be strict in what they emit, and liberal in what they accept. The odd thing is that people themselves are not willing to be strict in how they speak, and liberal in how they listen. You'd think that would also be obvious. Instead, we're taught to express ourselves.

Larry Wall
It's, uh, pseudo code. Yeah, that's the ticket...
[...]
And 'unicode' is pseudo code for $encoding.

Larry Wall
Larry's 2nd Law of Language Redesign: Larry gets the colon.

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

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

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

Larry Wall
I don't like this official/unofficial distinction. It sound, er, officious.

Larry Wall
Psychotics are consistently inconsistent. The essence of sanity is to be inconsistently inconsistent.

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

Larry Wall
I hope I'm not getting so famous that I can't think out load [sic] anymore.

Larry Wall
I want to see people using Perl to glue things together creatively, not just technically but also socially.

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

Larry Wall
There are still some other things to do, so don't think if I didn't fix your favorite bug that your bug report is in the bit bucket. (It may be, but don't think it.)

Larry Wall
Perl itself is usually pretty good about telling you what you shouldn't do.

Larry Wall