Best 176 quotes of Larry Wall on MyQuotes

A good messenger expects to get shot.

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

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

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.

All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory.

Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose.

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

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.

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.

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

An initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer.

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

A Perl program is correct if it gets the job done before your boss fires you.

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.

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

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

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.

Being famous has its benefits, but fame isn't one of them.

[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.

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. :-)

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.

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

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

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

Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make 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.

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

Don't wear rollerskates to a tug-of-war.

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

Even if you aren't in doubt, consider the mental welfare of the person who has to maintain the code after you, and who will probably put parens in the wrong place.

Even the White House has a press agent.

For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.

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

Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.

Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.

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

I'd make people say 'use Fork;' if I thought I could get away with it.

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

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

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

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

If you consistently take an antagonistic approach, however, people are going to start thinking you're from New York.

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.

If you write something wrong enough, I'll be glad to make up a new witticism just for you.

I just hope I'm never promoted to the level of my incontinence.

I'm afraid my gut level reaction is basically, proceed is cute, but cute doesn't cut it in the emergency room.

I'm a great believer in visual distinctions.

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'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.

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.