Larry Wall: Trending quotes

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Larry Wall: 588 quotes2 likes

“Okay, that's definitely enough hype.”

In the perl man page.
Documentation

“Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose.”

[199712040054.QAA13811@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

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

From the glossary of the first Programming Perl book.
Other

“Tcl tends to get ported to weird places like routers.”

[199710071721.KAA19014@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

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

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

“I try not to confuse roles and traits in my own life. Being the Perl god is a role. Being a stubborn cuss is a trait.”

[20031215021442.GA4012@wall.org, 2003]
Usenet postings, 2003

“How do Crays and Alphas handle the POSIX problem?”

[199709050042.RAA29379@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“I'm serious about thinking through all the possibilities before we settle on anything. All things have the advantages of their disadvantages, and vice versa.”

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

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

Source code, <code>Configure</code>

“The way these things go, there are probably 6 or 8 kludgey ways to do it, and a better way that involves rethinking something that hasn't been rethunk yet.”

[199710221859.LAA24889@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

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

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

“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.”

Public Talks, The State of the Onion 11

“We don't have enough parallel universes to allow all uses of all junction types--in the absence of quantum computing the combinatorics are not in our favor…”

[20031213210102.GE18685@wall.org, 2003]
Usenet postings, 2003

“Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.”

"We've got to start over from scratch" - Well, that's almost any academic language you find.
"English phrases" - Well, that's Cobol. You know, cargo cult English. (laughter)
"Text processing doesn't matter much" - Fortran.
"Simple languages produce simple solutions" - C.
"If I wanted it fast, I'd write it in C" - That's almost a direct quote from the original awk page.
"I thought of a way to do it so it must be right" - That's obviously PHP. (laughter and applause)
"You can build anything with NAND gates" - Any language designed by an electrical engineer. (laughter)
"This is a very high level language, who cares about bits?" - The entire scope of fourth generation languages fell into this... problem.
"Users care about elegance" - A lot of languages from Europe tend to fall into this. You know, Eiffel.
"The specification is good enough" - Ada.
"Abstraction equals usability" - Scheme. Things like that.
"The common kernel should be as small as possible" - Forth.
"Let's make this easy for the computer" - Lisp. (laughter)
"Most programs are designed top-down" - Pascal. (laughter)
"Everything is a vector" - APL.
"Everything is an object" - Smalltalk and its children. (whispered:) Ruby. (laughter)
"Everything is a hypothesis" - Prolog. (laughter)
"Everything is a function" - Haskell. (laughter)
"Programmers should never have been given free will" - Obviously, Python. (laughter).
Public Talks, "Present Continuous - Future Perfect"

“Perl has a long tradition of working around compilers.”

[199708252256.PAA00105@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“Y'know, there are other possibilities if we assume that filenames are UTF-8…yikes…wait, put down that meat cleaver! Aieeee!!!”

[199806181655.JAA10702@wall.org, 1998]
Usenet postings, 1998

“There's something to be said for returning the whole syntax tree.”

[199710221833.LAA24741@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“I was trying not to mention backtracking. Which, of course, means that yours is 'righter' than mine, in a theoretical sense.”

[199710211624.JAA17833@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“Hey, if pi == 3, and three == 0, does that make pi == 0?”

[199711011926.LAA25557@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“Well, sure, I explicitly mentioned 'vtables' last time I brought this up. But a single pointer is fairly paltry, as tables go.”

[199808170117.SAA19369@wall.org, 1998]
Usenet postings, 1998