Larry Wall: Language

Larry Wall is American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl. Explore interesting quotes on language.
Larry Wall: 588   quotes 2   likes

“If there's a particular problem that Perl is trying to solve, it's the basic fact that all programming languages suck. Sort of the concept of original sin, applied to programming languages.”

Larry Wall

Public Talks, The State of the Onion 10

Problem

“Besides, including < std_ice_cubes. h> is a fatal error on machines that don't have it yet. Bad language design, there…”

Larry Wall

[1991Aug22.220929.6857@netlabs.com, 1991]
Usenet postings, 1991

Error

“I started out as a BASIC programmer. Some people would say that I'm permanently damaged. Some people are undoubtedly right… But I'm not going to apologize for that. All language designers have their occasional idiosyncracies. I'm just better at it than most.”

Larry Wall

Public Talks, The State of the Onion 11

People

“That could certainly be done, but I don't want to fall into the Forth trap, where every running Forth implementation is really a different language.”

Larry Wall

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

“Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.”

Larry Wall

[8571@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV, 1990]
Usenet postings, 1990

“There are a lotta computer languages out there doing drugs.”

Larry Wall

Public Talks, The State of the Onion 10

“But the possibility of abuse may be a good reason for leaving capabilities out of other computer languages, it's not a good reason for leaving capabilities out of Perl.”

Larry Wall

[199709251614.JAA15718@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“Think of prototypes as a funny markup language--the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine.”

Larry Wall

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

Thinking

“Larry's 2nd Law of Language Redesign: Larry gets the colon.”

Larry Wall

"Apocalypse 5: Regular Expressions", perl.com, 2001-06-04 http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/06/04/apo5.html?page=6
Other
Variant: &hellip; I also discovered Larry's First Law of Language Redesign: Everyone wants the colon.

Law

“All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory…”

Larry Wall

[1991Jul13.010945.19157@netlabs.com, 1991]
Usenet postings, 1991

“You can prove anything by mentioning another computer language.”

Larry Wall

[199706242038.NAA29853@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“Just don't compare it with a real language, or you'll be unhappy…”

Larry Wall

[1992May12.190238.5667@netlabs.com, 1992]
Usenet postings, 1992

“Anyway, there's plenty of room for doubt. It might seem easy enough, but computer language design is just like a stroll in the park.Jurassic Park, that is.”

Larry Wall

[1994Jun15.074039.2654@netlabs.com, 1994]
Usenet postings, 1994

“I simultaneously believe that languages are wonderful and awful. You have to hold both of those. Ugly things can be beautiful. And beautiful can get ugly very fast. You know, take Lisp. You know, it's the most beautiful language in the world. At least up until Haskell came along. (laughter) But, you know, every program in Lisp is just ugly. I don't figure how that works.”

Larry Wall

Public Talks, "Present Continuous - Future Perfect"

World , Beauty , Laughter

“Well, enough clowning around. Perl is, in intent, a cleaned up and summarized version of that wonderful semi-natural language known as'Unix.”

Larry Wall

[1994Apr6.184419.3687@netlabs.com, 1994]
Usenet postings, 1994

Nature

“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

“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

“If you want to program in C, program in C. It's a nice language. I use it occasionally…”

Larry Wall

[7577@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV, 1990]
Usenet postings, 1990

“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

“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

Future , Parting