Larry Wall: Trending quotes (page 10)

“That being said, I think we should immediately deprecate any string concatenation that combines '19' with '99.”

Larry Wall

[199811242002.MAA26850@wall.org, 1998]
Usenet postings, 1998

Thinking

“They can always run stderr through uniq.”

Larry Wall

[199704012331.PAA16535@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“Yes, we have consensus that we need 64 bit support.”

Larry Wall

[199710291922.LAA07101@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

Support

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

Larry Wall

[199702221943.LAA20388@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“Of course, I reserve the right to make wholly stupid changes to Perl if I think they improve the language.”

Larry Wall

[199704251604.JAA27300@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

Stupidity , Thinking , Change

“Besides, REAL computers have a rename() system call.”

Larry Wall

[7937@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV, 1990]
Usenet postings, 1990

“As usual, I'm overstating the case to knock a few neurons loose, but the truth is usually somewhere in the muddle, uh, middle.”

Larry Wall

[199702111639.IAA28425@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

Truth

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

Larry Wall

[1992Aug26.184221.29627@netlabs.com, 1992]
Usenet postings, 1992

Thinking

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

Larry Wall

[199804141540.IAA05247@wall.org, 1998]
Usenet postings, 1998

People , Suicide

“The only reason I've managed to run this open source project, is that I have learned to delegate even the delegation to other people.”

Larry Wall

final words of the video
Public Talks, Larry Wall Speaks at Google (2008)

People , Learning

“I was about to say, 'Avoid fame like the plague,' but you know, they can cure the plague with penicillin these days.”

Larry Wall

[199709242015.NAA10312@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

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

Larry Wall

[199707300650.XAA05515@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

Falseness

“Randal can write one-liners again. Everyone is happy, and peace spreads over the whole Earth.”

Larry Wall

[199705101952.MAA00756@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

Peace , Happiness

“But you could do extreme programming. In fact, I had a college buddy I did pair programming with. We took a compiler writing class together and studied all that fancy stuff from the dragon book. Then of course the professor announced we would be implementing our own language, called PL/0. After thinking about it a while, we announced that we were going to do our project in BASIC. The professor looked at us like we were insane. Nobody else in the class was using BASIC. And you know what? Nobody else in the class finished their compiler either. We not only finished but added I/O extensions, and called it PL 0.5. That's rapid prototyping.”

Larry Wall

Public Talks, The State of the Onion 11

Books , Thinking , Study

“tt>if (instr(buf, sys_errlist[ errno])) /* you don't see this */</tt”

Larry Wall

eval.c.
Source code, Other files

“Piet van Oostrum: I find this a nice feature but it is not according to the documentation. Or is it a BUG?
Larry Wall: Let's call it an accidental feature.”

Larry Wall

[6909@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV, 1990]
Usenet postings, 1990

“You don't have to wait--you can have it in 5.004_54 or so.”

Larry Wall

[199710221740.KAA24455@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

Waiting

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

Larry Wall

Usenet postings, 1997

People

“> (It's sorta like sed, but not. It's sorta like awk, but not. etc.)Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.”

Larry Wall

[1992Aug26.184221.29627@netlabs.com, 1992]
Usenet postings, 1992

“Oh, get ahold of yourself. Nobody's proposing that we parse English.”

Larry Wall

[199709032332.QAA21669@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997