Larry Wall Quotes

233 Sourced Quotes

Perl did not get where it is by ignoring psychological factors.

Larry Wall
Not that I have anything much against redundancy. But I said that already.

Larry Wall
Personally, I like to defiantly split my infinitives.

Larry Wall
And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is.

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

Larry Wall
Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.

Larry Wall
I'm sure a mathematician would claim that 0 and 1 are both very interesting numbers.

Larry Wall
I've always maintained a cordial dislike for indent, because it's usually
right.

Larry Wall
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.

Larry Wall
Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to pay another nickel. But hey! You only feel 5 cents poorer each time.

Larry Wall
As for whether Perl 6 will replace Perl 5, yeah, probably, in about 40 years or so.

Larry Wall
Magically turning people's old scalar contexts into list contexts is a recipe for several kinds of disaster.

Larry Wall
... an initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer.

Larry Wall
On the plus side, it's a lot easier in general to find /usr/include than cpp.

Larry Wall
The only disadvantage I see is that it would force everyone to get Perl. Horrors.

Larry Wall
The code also assumes that it's difficult to misspell 'a' or 'b'.

Larry Wall
Yes, we have consensus that we need 64 bit support.

Larry Wall
I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?

Larry Wall
Is LISP a candidate for a scripting language? While you can certainly write things rapidly in it, I cannot in good conscience call LISP a scripting language. By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere mortals... And, of course, mere mortals have never really forgiven LISP for not catering to them.

Larry Wall
There are a lotta computer languages out there doing drugs.

Larry Wall
But you could do extreme programming. In fact, I had a college buddy I did pair programming with. We took a compiler writing class together and studied all that fancy stuff from the dragon book. Then of course the professor announced we would be implementing our own language, called PL/0. After thinking about it a while, we announced that we were going to do our project in BASIC. The professor looked at us like we were insane. Nobody else in the class was using BASIC. And you know what? Nobody else in the class finished their compiler either. We not only finished but added I/O extensions, and called it PL 0.5. That's rapid prototyping.

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

Larry Wall
End of diatribe. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming...

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

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

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
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