Larry Wall - Perl Quotes

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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
: But for some things, Perl just isn't the optimal choice.

(yet)

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

Gee, it took me about eleven years.

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
And it goes against the grain of building small tools.
Innocent, Your Honor. Perl users build small tools all day long.

Larry Wall
As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be visually distinct.

Larry Wall
The whole intent of Perl 5's module system was to encourage the growth of Perl culture rather than the Perl core.

Larry Wall
If you remove stricture from a large Perl program currently, you're just installing delayed bugs, whereas with this feature, you're installing an instant bug that's easily fixed. Whoopee.

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

Larry Wall
I view the JVM as just another architecture that Perl ought to be ported to. (That, and the Underwood typewriter...)

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
Perl should remain fast and intuitive (to the extent that it is :-)

Larry Wall
Anybody want a binary telemetry frame editor written in Perl?

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

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
Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something.

Larry Wall
A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.

Larry Wall
There's really no way to fix this and still keep Perl pathologically eclectic.

Larry Wall
In general, if you think something isn't in Perl, try it out, because it usually is.

Larry Wall
Perl has a long tradition of working around compilers.

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

Larry Wall
There are many times when you want it to ignore the rest of the string just like atof() does. Oddly enough, Perl calls atof(). How convenient.

Larry Wall
It may be possible to get this condition from within Perl if a signal handler runs at just the wrong moment. Another point for Chip...

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
Perl itself is usually pretty good about telling you what you shouldn't do.

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

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

Larry Wall