Larry Wall - Course Quotes

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Then you start building things like the Berlin wall to keep people inside your community. In anthropological terms, that's tribalism. A tribal Perl programmer might say, "If you leave the Perl tribe to go and join the Python tribe, we will hunt you down, cook you, and eat you." Or if you join the Ruby tribe, you will explode. By and large, I am not in favor of tribalism. Except for my tribe, of course.

Larry Wall
Of course, this being Perl, we could always take both approaches.

Larry Wall
It is, of course, written in Perl. Translation to C is left as an exercise for the reader.

Larry Wall
Of course, I reserve the right to make wholly stupid changes to Perl if I think they improve the language.

Larry Wall
The court finds everyone to be in contempt (including himself :-), and orders everyone sentenced to five years hard labor. (Working on Perl, of course.)

Larry Wall
'Course, that doesn't work when 'a' contains parentheses.

Larry Wall
Historically Tcl has always stored all intermediate results as strings. (With 8.0 they're rethinking that. Of course, Perl rethought that from the start.)

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
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
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
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
I was trying not to mention backtracking. Which, of course, means that yours is 'righter' than mine, in a theoretical sense.

Larry Wall