Larry Wall Quotes (294 quotes, page 5) | Quotes of famous people

Larry Wall: 294 quotes2 likes

Larry Wall Quotes

“switch (ref $@) { OverflowError => warn 'Dam needs to be drained'; DomainError => warn 'King needs to be trained'; NuclearWarError => die; }”

Larry Wall

[199709302338.QAA17037@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“In Clintonese, that would be 'You are free to infer that I was saying that.”

Larry Wall

[199809222305.QAA17574@wall.org, 1998]
Usenet postings, 1998

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

Larry Wall

Message-ID &lt;20050516005559.GC26184@wall.org&gt; http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.language/21259, to perl6-language mailing-list. <br class="br">Other

“Is LISP a candidate for a scripting language? While you can certainly write things rapidly in it, I cannot in good conscience call LISP a scripting language. By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere mortals… And, of course, mere mortals have never really forgiven LISP for not catering to them.”

Larry Wall

Public Talks, The State of the Onion 11

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

Larry Wall

Usenet postings, 1992

“If you're going to define a shortcut, then make it the base [ sic] darn shortcut you can.”

Larry Wall

[199709241628.JAA08908@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“If I allowed 'next $label' then I'd also have to allow 'goto $label', and I don't think you really want that…”

Larry Wall

[1991Mar11.230002.27271@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov, 1991]
Usenet postings, 1991

“In general, if you think something isn't in Perl, try it out, because it usually is.”

Larry Wall

[1991Jul31.174523.9447@netlabs.com, 1991]
Usenet postings, 1991

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

Larry Wall

[199710211959.MAA18990@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“Well, I think Perl should run faster than C.”

Larry Wall

[199801200306.TAA11638@wall.org, 1998]
Usenet postings, 1998

“It's getting harder and harder to think out loud. One of these days someone's gonna go off and kill Thomas a'Becket for me…”

Larry Wall

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

“I hope I'm not getting so famous that I can't think out load [ sic] anymore.”

Larry Wall

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

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

Larry Wall

In the perl man page.
Documentation

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

Larry Wall

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

“There ain't nothin' in this world that's worth being a snot over.”

Larry Wall

[1992Aug19.041614.6963@netlabs.com, 1992]
Usenet postings, 1992

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

Larry Wall

[1992Sep21.214659.22849@netlabs.com, 1992]
Usenet postings, 1992

“The way I see it, if you declare something portable, you'll always be wrong, and if you declare it non-portable, you'll always be right.”

Larry Wall

[199806232215.PAA02356@wall.org, 1998]
Usenet postings, 1998

“There are still some other things to do, so don't think if I didn't fix your favorite bug that your bug report is in the bit bucket. (It may be, but don't think it.”

Larry Wall

[7238@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV, 1990]
Usenet postings, 1990

“I'm sure that that could be indented more readably, but I'm scared of the awk parser.”

Larry Wall

[6849@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV, 1990]
Usenet postings, 1990

“Okay, that's definitely enough hype.”

Larry Wall

In the perl man page.
Documentation

“Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose.”

Larry Wall

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

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

Larry Wall

From the glossary of the first Programming Perl book.
Other

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

Larry Wall

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

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

Larry Wall

[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.”

Larry Wall

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

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

Larry Wall

[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.”

Larry Wall

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

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

Larry Wall

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.”

Larry Wall

[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.”

Larry Wall

[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.”

Larry Wall

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…”

Larry Wall

[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.”

Larry Wall

"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.”

Larry Wall

[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!!!”

Larry Wall

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

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

Larry Wall

[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.”

Larry Wall

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

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

Larry Wall

[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.”

Larry Wall

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

“I would estimate that the number of programs it breaks in the world will be less than 10. As long as one of those 10 isn't CGI. pm, we're probably okay.”

Larry Wall

[199804161805.LAA18882@wall.org, 1998]
Usenet postings, 1998

“If you remove stricture from a large Perl program currently, you're just installing delayed bugs, whereas with this feature, you're installing an instant bug that's easily fixed. Whoopee.”

Larry Wall

[199710050130.SAA04762@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“People understand instinctively that the best way for computer programs to communicate with each other is for each of the them to be strict in what they emit, and liberal in what they accept. The odd thing is that people themselves are not willing to be strict in how they speak, and liberal in how they listen. You'd think that would also be obvious. Instead, we're taught to express ourselves.”

Larry Wall

Public Talks, "2nd State of the Onion"

“Dan Smith: I've tried (in vi) 'g/[ a-z] \n[ a-z]/s//_/'…but that doesn't cut it. Any ideas? (I take it that it may be a two-pass sort of solution).
Larry Wall: In the first pass, install perl.”

Larry Wall

[6849@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV, 1990]
Usenet postings, 1990

“Reserve your abuse for your true friends.”

Larry Wall

[199712041852.KAA19364@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“We didn't put in ^^ because then we'd have to keep telling people what it means, and then we'd have to keep telling them why it doesn't short circuit. :-/”

Larry Wall

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

“Oh, wait, that was Randal…nevermind…”

Larry Wall

[199709261754.KAA23761@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“As for whether Perl 6 will replace Perl 5, yeah, probably, in about 40 years or so.”

Larry Wall

"Developers can unwrap Perl 6 on Christmas", Infoworld, 2015-12-21 http://www.infoworld.com/article/3017418/application-development/developers-can-unwrap-perl-6-on-christmas.html <br class="br">Other

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

Larry Wall

[1991Nov13.194420.28091@netlabs.com, 1991]
Usenet postings, 1991

“People who understand context would be steamed to have someone else dictating how they can call it.”

Larry Wall

[199710221710.KAA24242@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“If this were Ada, I suppose we'd just constant fold 1/0 into die 'Illegal division by zero”

Larry Wall

[199711100226.SAA12549@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997