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

“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"

“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

“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

“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

“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