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

"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"

Thinking

“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

Waiting

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

Larry Wall

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

Tree

“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

Sense

“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

Time

“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

World

“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"

People , Way , Communication , Understanding

“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

Idea

“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

People

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

Larry Wall

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

Waiting

“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
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