Larry wall quotes

I'm a great believer in visual distinctions.

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

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

A good messenger expects to get shot.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I'm sorry, but you just made me lose my sense of humor, which is deeply regrettable.

What about writing it first and rationalizing it afterwards?

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

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

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

Well, you know, Hubbard had a bunch of people sworn to commit suicide when he died. So of course he never officially died.

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

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

Perl should remain fast and intuitive (to the extent that it is :-)

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

You can never entirely stop being what you once were. That's why it's important to be the right person today, and not put it off till tomorrow.

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.

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

Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality.

Reserve your abuse for your true friends.

Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.

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

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

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

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

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.

I wouldn't ever write the full sentence myself, but then, I never use goto either.

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.

It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.

Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

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

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

You want it in one line? Does it have to fit in 80 columns?

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.

Perhaps I'm missing the gene for making enemies.

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

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

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.

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

You need to go and find someone to teach you the rudiments of irrational discourse.

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

Just don't create a file called '-rf.'

Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry.

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.

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.

Though I'll admit readability suffers slightly.

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

Programmers can be lazy.

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

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.

What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against?

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

You can prove anything by mentioning another computer language.

Odd that we think definitions are definitive.

Besides, REAL computers have a rename system call.

Just because you're into control doesn't mean you're in control.

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

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.

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

The autodecrement is not magical.

Even the White House has a press agent.

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

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.

Let us be charitable, and call it a misleading feature.

[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.

When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi.

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

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

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

Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable.

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

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. :-)

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

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

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

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.

People get annoyed when you try to debug them.

The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your resume by a word and a comma.

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

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

Are you perchance running on a 64-bit machine?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Not that I have anything much against redundancy. But I said that already.

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

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

Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.

Perhaps you should compile your Perl with long doubles one of these megaseconds.

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.

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

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

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?

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

The whole intent of Perl 5's module system was to encourage the growth of Perl culture rather than the Perl core.

Laziness is a programmers main virtue.

It should be illegal to yell 'Y2K' in a crowded economy.

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

We're really serious about reinventing everything that needs reinventing.

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

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

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.

For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Save it for my unauthorized autobiography.

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

Obviously I was either onto something, or on something.

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