Larry Wall Quotes

233 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Flutter, flutter.

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

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

Gee, it took me about eleven years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Larry Wall