Larry Wall - Language Quotes

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Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

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

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

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

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
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
There are a lotta computer languages out there doing drugs.

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

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
Well, enough clowning around. Perl is, in intent, a cleaned up and summarized version of that wonderful semi-natural language known as
'Unix'.

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
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
You can prove anything by mentioning another computer language.

Larry Wall
All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory...

Larry Wall
I started out as a BASIC programmer. Some people would say that I'm permanently damaged. Some people are undoubtedly right... But I'm not going to apologize for that. All language designers have their occasional idiosyncracies. I'm just better at it than most.

Larry Wall
…I also discovered Larry's First Law of Language Redesign: Everyone wants the colon.

Larry Wall
Just don't compare it with a real language, or you'll be unhappy...

Larry Wall
Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.

Larry Wall
But the possibility of abuse may be a good reason for leaving capabilities out of other computer languages, it's not a good reason for leaving capabilities out of Perl.

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

Larry Wall
If there's a particular problem that Perl is trying to solve, it's the basic fact that all programming languages suck. Sort of the concept of original sin, applied to programming languages.

Larry Wall