Larry Wall - People Quotes

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

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

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

Larry Wall
Not that I'm against sneaking some notions into people's heads upon occasion. (Or blasting them in outright.)

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
People who understand context would be steamed to have someone else dictating how they can call it.

Larry Wall
But I know what's important to me, and what isn't. And I think I know what people can get used to, and what they can even learn to like. It just takes some people longer than others. :-)

Larry Wall
To someone at New York University:
If you consistently take an antagonistic approach, however, people are going to start thinking you're from New York.

Larry Wall
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
We didn't put in ^^ because then we'd have to keep telling people what it means, and then we'd have to keep telling them why it doesn't short circuit. :-/

Larry Wall
P. S. I suppose I really should be nicer to people today, considering I'll be singing in Billy Graham's choir tonight...

Larry Wall
One thing I do understand is that people get scared when I start thinking out loud.

Larry Wall
What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against?

Larry Wall
I'd make people say 'use Fork;' if I thought I could get away with it.

Larry Wall
There's some entertainment value in watching people juggle nitroglycerin.

Larry Wall
The only reason I've managed to run this open source project, is that I have learned to delegate even the delegation to other people.

Larry Wall
[Boxed] Multiple bouncing balls in a box are a metaphor for community. Notice how the escaping balls explode. This is what happens to people who move from Perl to Ruby.

Larry Wall
So please don't think I have a 'down' on the MVS people. I'm just pulling off their arms to beat other people over the head with.

Larry Wall