Larry Wall Quotations

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

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

Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.

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

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.

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

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

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.

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

The world has become a larger place. The universe has been expanding, and Perl's been expanding along with the universe.

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

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.

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

I talked about becoming stupid, but I've always been stupid. Fortunately I've been just smart enough to realize that I'm stupid.

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

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.

If any ideology is so serious that you can't have fun while you're doing it, it's probably too serious.

There is no schedule. We are all volunteers, so we get it done when we get it done. Perl 5 still works fine, and we plan to take the right amount of time on Perl 6.

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

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

The problems that I really like to solve are our cultural problems.

We are so Post-Modern that we don't realize how Post-Modern we are anymore.

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.

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 still drive my 1977 Honda Accord. The paint is almost all worn off. It's still running.

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

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.

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.

When I announced the development of Perl 6, I said it was going to be a community design. I designed Perl, myself. It's limited by my own brain power. So I wanted Perl 6 to be a community design.

I am not a sort of person who wants to run a company.

I'm just paid to do whatever I want to do. Some of the time it's development, and some of the time it's just goofing off.

Mr. Campbell paints a very rosy picture. It sounds too good to be true because it is too good to be true.

I don't think it's worth washing hogs over.

We have the opportunity to produce feedstock to make fabrics like polyesters, plastics for films that wrap our foods, or plastics for things like milk bottles, car parts, all of that. The outcomes are the deliverables.

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.

That was huge, in a 7-7 game to give us great field position. That was probably the difference in the football game right there.

When Ivan hit last year, it passed over 150 platforms.

We won't know any of that until that monster moves on through.

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.

You can't build new ones, so you keep what you have.

The storm caused the Gulf of Mexico to be evacuated.

About a third of the nation's refining capacity is either down or in peril, ... you will see prices go up. But it will be only temporary.

It has been very hard for these companies, because many of them first had to locate their workers who had been evacuated and now have to deal with problems of access to their facilities.

These two storms took the most destructive path over the Gulf that they could.

The impression we're getting from our members is that it's going even better than expected.

The heart and never-say-die attitude was key. The guys just battled and battled. We've got a lot of guys going both ways, had some key injuries the week before, but a lot of guys stepped up and that's what it's all about.

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

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

Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism. More fun, too. Ask any mitochondria.

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.

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

People get annoyed when you try to debug them.

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?

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.

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

That which hits the fan tends to get flung in all directions.

The problem with using C++ ... is that there's already a strong tendency in the language to require you to know everything before you can do anything.

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.

True greatness is measured by how much freedom you give to others, not by how much you can coerce others to do what you want.

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

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...

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.

When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.

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

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

I'm definitely a night owl. I get going about the time my wife crashes and goes to bed. And in some sense, I've had to learn to be more of a cat napper in recent years because Perl development, Perl design and development, has become a worldwide phenomenon - not just mailing lists, but RSC channels, Twitter even. This all happens 24 hours a day. And people come up with questions at any time of the day or night.

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

You can’t change the past. You can’t even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives.

Perl doesn't have an infatuation with enforced privacy. It would prefer that you stayed out of its living room because you weren't invited, not because it has a shotgun

Programmers can be lazy.

It's easier to make up sayings people like to hear than sayings they like to heed.

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.

I won't mention any names, because I don't want to get sun4's into trouble...

There ain't nothin' in this world that's worth being a snot over.

Even the White House has a press agent.

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.

At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Perl has a long tradition of working around compilers.

If you want your program to be readable, consider supplying the argument.

I'm a great believer in visual distinctions.

The court finds everyone to be in contempt (including himself:;:-), and orders everyone sentenced to five years hard labor. (Working on Perl, of course.

To Perl , or not to Perl, that is the kvetching.

Well, I think Perl should run faster than C.

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

All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory...

There's many scripting languages in the world, Perl is a little bit special because it is based more on some ideas from the way natural languages work.

Information wants to be useful.

Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible.

For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.

You don't have to know the whole language to use it usefully, you can do baby talk, you can do grown up talk, you can cuss in it, you can write poetry, you can be a playwright, is sort of the idea.

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