Larry Wall Thinking Quotations

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.

I think computer science, by and large, is still stuck in the Modern age.

I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.

Some of modern engineering is necessary to good art. But I think of myself is a cultural artist.

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.

I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.

The refineries aren't going anywhere. There is too much invested in them here and companies wouldn't be working this hard to rebuild if they were thinking of moving.

So many computer languages try to force you into one way of thinking and Perl is very much the opposite of that approach. It's kind of like a, well, sometimes Perl has been called the Swiss army chainsaw of the internet, but it's more like a Swiss army machine shop. It really gives you a lot of tools, some of which are dangerous, but it lets you get your job done very quickly.

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

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

I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident.

But you have to allow a little for the desire to evangelize when you think you have good news.

I think that's easier to read. Pardon me. Less difficult to read.

Well, I think Perl should run faster than C.

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

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

The trouble with being quoted a lot is that it makes other people think you're quoting yourself when in fact you're merely repeating yourself.

I think I'm likely to be certified before Perl is...

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.

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.

(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.

That being said, I think we should immediately deprecate any string concatenation that combines '19' with '99'.

And besides, if Perl really takes off in the Windows space, I think the rest of us would just as soon have a double-agent within ActiveState.

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.

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

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

Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.

Odd that we think definitions are definitive.

My arthritic pinkies are already starting to ache just thinking about ||||=.

Many computer scientists have fallen into the trap of trying to define languages like George Orwell's Newspeak, in which it is impossible to think bad thoughts. What they end up doing is killing the creativity of programming.