“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"

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Larry Wall 294
American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl 1954

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