Larry Wall Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

Obviously I was either onto something, or on something.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry.

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

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

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

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

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

Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you perchance running on a 64-bit machine?