Larry Wall Trying Quotations

Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.

We're still trying to get a handle on this thing, but it is too soon to put firm numbers on the damage. This is one of the worst calamities we've been through and it is one of the worst I've seen as far as hurricane damage.

People get annoyed when you try to debug them.

I've decided I don't want to be a manager. Every time you try to be responsive to your employees, they say you're being reactive and not proactive. And when you try to be proactive, they accuse you of being capricious and arbitrary. So I don't wanna be a manager...

A lazy person will try to always find some way to do something; they'll always be looking for ways of doing something faster, more efficiently, and if you really want to control the world, that's a really sort of hubristic notion - excessive pride, the thing that Zeus zaps you for having.

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.

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.

I try not to confuse roles and traits in my own life. Being the Perl god is a role. Being a stubborn cuss is a trait.

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.