Larry Wall Quotes & Sayings

Younger hackers are hard to classify. They're probably just as diverse as the old hackers are. We're all over the map. — Larry Wall

The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases. — Larry Wall

I think I'll side with the pissheads on this one. — Larry Wall

And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is — Larry Wall

It's easy to solve the halting problem with a shotgun. — 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

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

Even the White House has a press agent. — Larry Wall

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris. — 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

I don't like this official/unofficial distinction. It sound, er, officious. — Larry Wall

It's appositival, if it's there. And it doesn't have to be there. And it's really obvious that it's there when it's there. — Larry Wall

This job of playing God is a little too big for me. Nevertheless, someone has to do it, so I'll try my best to fake it. — Larry Wall

There is, however, a strange, musty smell in the air that reminds me of something ... hmm ... yes ... I've got it ... there's a VMS nearby, or I'm a Blit. — Larry Wall

Psychotics are consistently inconsistent. The essence of sanity is to be inconsistently inconsistent. — Larry Wall

One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures. — Larry Wall

I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'. — Larry Wall

There's often more than one correct thing. There's often more than one right thing. There's often more than one obvious thing. — 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

Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context. — Larry Wall

Many days I don't write any code at all, and some days I spend all day writing code. — Larry Wall

The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other. — Larry Wall

Yes, but I did manage to increase the amount of virginity in the world by that method. — Larry Wall

Call me bored, but don't call me boring. — 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

The young think they are immortal, and are determined to prove otherwise. — Larry Wall

I'm never satisfied because I've been always interested in too many things and I always want to do everything at once. — Larry Wall

Let us be charitable, and call it a misleading feature — Larry Wall

Save it for my unauthorized autobiography. — 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

We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise. — Larry Wall

It's there as a sop to former Ada programmers. — Larry Wall

Life gets boring, someone invents another necessity, and once again we turn the crank on the screwjack of progress hoping that nobody gets screwed. — Larry Wall

You know, I've got my hands in 30 or 40 different pots simultaneously and so I have a little bit of all of that where I work. — Larry Wall

I want people to use Perl. I want to be a positive ingredient of the world and make my American history. So, whatever it takes to give away my software and get it used, that's great. — Larry Wall

Maybe we should take a clue from FTP and put in an option like 'print hash marks on every 1024 iterations'. — Larry Wall

I don't believe I've ever cuddled my elses. — Larry Wall

A good messenger expects to get shot. — Larry Wall

Odd that we think definitions are definitive. — Larry Wall

Take Lisp, you know its the most beautiful language in the world
at least up until Haskell came along. — Larry Wall

A journey of a thousand miles continues with the second step. — Larry Wall

I was raised a musician and I played classic music, violin, in orchestras and music comedy theaters, I have music running around in my head all the time, and if I hear music that's too interesting, I have to pay attention to it. — Larry Wall

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

Programmers can be lazy. — Larry Wall

To ordinary folks, conversion is not always automatic. It's something that may or may not require explicit assistance. See Billy Graham. — Larry Wall

For the sake of argument I'll ignore all your fighting words. — Larry Wall

And I don't like doing silly things (except on purpose). — Larry Wall

When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct? — Larry Wall

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

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

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

I'm not too concerned about the future of Perl after me, because I see how these people are interacting with each other and even when I'm not there, they are helping each other and solving each other's problems in a way that I could not do, even if I were there. — Larry Wall

Perl should remain fast and intuitive (to the extent that it is — Larry Wall

It is easier to port a shell than a shell script. — Larry Wall

We can debug relationships, but it's always good policy to consider the people themselves to be features. People get annoyed when you try to debug them. — Larry Wall

Natural languages generally are not designed by humans, they're just designed by the participants and you say something new and somebody else says, "Oh, that's a cool way to say it," and the next thing you know, everyone is saying it because it's shiny. — 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

It's hard to tune heavily tuned code. — Larry Wall

Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible. — Larry Wall

Any false value is gonna be fairly boring in Perl, mathematicians notwithstanding. — Larry Wall

Sometimes I wish I could put an expiration date on my quotes. — Larry Wall

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

To be a good artist, you have to serve the work of art and allow it to be what it is supposed to be. — Larry Wall

What about WRITING it first and rationalizing it afterwards? — Larry Wall

And in the limiting case where the optimizer is completely broken because it's not implemented yet, we get to work around that too. Optionally ... — Larry Wall

The camel has evolved to be relatively self-sufficient. On the other hand, the camel has not evolved to smell good. Neither has Perl. — Larry Wall

Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in. — Larry Wall

This does not mean that some of us should not want, in a rather dispassionate sort of way, to put a bullet through csh's head. — 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

Somebody out there is going to do something that's far more surprising than anything that I would do. I was surprised by the whole web thing in the first place. — Larry Wall

If you're a large corporation, you can afford to pay the money to register patents, but if you're an individual like me, you can't. — Larry Wall

I note that the Python folks still think they like JPython. I wonder how long that will last? — 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

Just don't create a file called. — Larry Wall

Orthogonality for orthogonality's sake is not something I'm keen on. — Larry Wall

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

Wow, I'm being shot at from both sides. That means I *must* be right. — Larry Wall

Basically there's just so much stuff flowing past on the internet now, you have to let most of it go. And I've grown accustomed to the process of not worrying too much about the stuff I'm not getting to, because the important stuff will come back around. — Larry Wall

The way I see it, if you declare something portable, you'll always be wrong, and if you declare it non-portable, you'll always be right. — Larry Wall

Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to pay another nickel. But hey! You only feel 5 cents poorer each time. — Larry Wall

We're really serious about reinventing everything that needs reinventing. — Larry Wall

Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned the language, it's more expressive. — Larry Wall

Perhaps I'm missing the gene for making enemies. — Larry Wall

The autodecrement is not magical. — Larry Wall

Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is. — Larry Wall

While I have historically been a late worker, you know, sometimes I even like to get up early and see what's happened in the few hours of the night and then I often take a nap in the middle of the day just to sort of make up for stretching my day out. — Larry Wall

Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse. — Larry Wall

If you and I always agree, then one of us is redundant. — Larry Wall

Obviously I was either onto something, or on something. — Larry Wall

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

The computer should be doing the hard work. That's what it's paid to do, after all. — 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

Well, hey, let's just make everything into a closure, and then we'll have our general garbage collector, installed by 'use less memory'. — Larry Wall

I take time to watch anime. I don't know whether I'm allowed to, but I do it anyway. — Larry Wall

Computer programming is really a lot like writing a recipe. If you've read a recipe, you know what the structure of a recipe is, it's got some things up at the top that are your ingredients, and below that, the directions for how to deal with those ingredients. — Larry Wall

I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it. — Larry Wall

It's certainly easy to calculate the average attendance for Perl conferences. — Larry Wall

Would you trust the linguistic intuitions of someone who has been studying Latin or Greek for three days? — Larry Wall

It won't be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all ... — Larry Wall