Larry Wall quotes:

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.

One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.

For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.

Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned the language, it's more expressive.

The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.

When I announced the development of Perl 6, I said it was going to be a community design. I designed Perl, myself. It's limited by my own brain power. So I wanted Perl 6 to be a community design.

I think computer science, by and large, is still stuck in the Modern age.

I still drive my 1977 Honda Accord. The paint is almost all worn off. It's still running.

Younger hackers are hard to classify. They're probably just as diverse as the old hackers are. We're all over the map.

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

I take time to watch anime. I don't know whether I'm allowed to, but I do it anyway.

Take Lisp, you know its the most beautiful language in the world -- at least up until Haskell came along.

There is no schedule. We are all volunteers, so we get it done when we get it done. Perl 5 still works fine, and we plan to take the right amount of time on Perl 6.

The world has become a larger place. The universe has been expanding, and Perl's been expanding along with the universe.

Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.

Some of modern engineering is necessary to good art. But I think of myself is a cultural artist.

Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.

I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.

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.

It's there as a sop to former Ada programmers.

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.

I want to see people using Perl to glue things together creatively, not just technically but also socially.

I'm just paid to do whatever I want to do. Some of the time it's development, and some of the time it's just goofing off.

I was raised a musician and I played classic music, violin, in orchestras and music comedy theaters, I have music running around in my head all the time, and if I hear music that's too interesting, I have to pay attention to it.

Computer programming is really a lot like writing a recipe. If you've read a recipe, you know what the structure of a recipe is, it's got some things up at the top that are your ingredients, and below that, the directions for how to deal with those ingredients.

When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct?

A lazy person will try to always find some way to do something; they'll always be looking for ways of doing something faster, more efficiently, and if you really want to control the world, that's a really sort of hubristic notion - excessive pride, the thing that Zeus zaps you for having.

Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible.

There is, however, a strange, musty smell in the air that reminds me of something...hmm...yes...I've got it...there's a VMS nearby, or I'm a Blit.

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it.

I just hope I'm never promoted to the level of my incontinence.

Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.

A journey of a thousand miles continues with the second step.

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...

Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is.

Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism. More fun, too. Ask any mitochondria.

When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.

And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is.

I think that's easier to read. Pardon me. Less difficult to read.

I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.

This job of playing God is a little too big for me. Nevertheless, someone has to do it, so I'll try my best to fake it.

It is my job in life to travel all roads, so that some may take the road less travelled, and others the road more travelled, and all have a pleasant day.

Portability should be the default.

The problem with using C++ ... is that there's already a strong tendency in the language to require you to know everything before you can do anything.

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

I note that the Python folks still think they like JPython. I wonder how long that will last?

Not that I have anything much against redundancy. But I said that already.

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

Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.

I procrastinate, but mostly because there's always too many things to do, and I got the stew in my mind that things do bubble up, so I'll throw things in there and let them stew around. It's sort of like greasing the squeaky wheels in my own brain.

Programmers can be lazy.

Don't wear rollerskates to a tug-of-war.

If you're a large corporation, you can afford to pay the money to register patents, but if you're an individual like me, you can't.

I want people to use Perl. I want to be a positive ingredient of the world and make my American history. So, whatever it takes to give away my software and get it used, that's great.

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

We are so Post-Modern that we don't realize how Post-Modern we are anymore.

The problems that I really like to solve are our cultural problems.

"Lurking" is one metaphor that the Omniscience has allowed us to borrow.

(To someone at New York University) If you consistently take an antagonistic approach, however, people are going to start thinking you're from New York.

... an initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer.

...this does not mean that some of us should not want, in a rather dispassionate sort of way, to put a bullet through csh's head.

[Boxed] Multiple bouncing balls in a box are a metaphor for community. Notice how the escaping balls explode. This is what happens to people who move from Perl to Ruby .

[Perl] gives you the STDERR filehandle so that your program can make snide comments off to the side while it transforms (or attempts to transform) your input into your output.

A good messenger expects to get shot.

A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.

A Perl program is correct if it gets the job done before your boss fires you.

Accidental stacks considered harmful.

All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory...

Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose.

Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something.

And besides, if Perl really takes off in the Windows space, I think the rest of us would just as soon have a double-agent within ActiveState.

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

And in the limiting case where the optimizer is completely broken because it's not implemented yet, we get to work around that too. Optionally...

Any false value is gonna be fairly boring in Perl, mathematicians notwithstanding.

Are you perchance running on a 64-bit machine?

As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be visually distinct.

As someone pointed out, you could have an attribute that says 'optimize the heck out of this routine', and your definition of heck would be a parameter to the optimizer.

Basically there's just so much stuff flowing past on the internet now, you have to let most of it go. And I've grown accustomed to the process of not worrying too much about the stuff I'm not getting to, because the important stuff will come back around.

Being famous has its benefits, but fame isn't one of them.

Besides, REAL computers have a rename() system call.

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 .

But you have to allow a little for the desire to evangelize when you think you have good news.

Call me bored, but don't call me boring.

Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.

Even if you aren't in doubt, consider the mental welfare of the person who has to maintain the code after you, and who will probably put parens in the wrong place.

Even the White House has a press agent.

For the sake of argument I'll ignore all your fighting words.

Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.

Historically speaking, the presence of wheels in Unix has never precluded their reinvention.

Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context.

I am not a sort of person who wants to run a company.

I don't believe I've ever cuddled my elses.

I don't like this official/unofficial distinction. It sound, er, officious.

I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'.

I talked about becoming stupid, but I've always been stupid. Fortunately I've been just smart enough to realize that I'm stupid.

I think I'll side with the pissheads on this one.

I think I'm likely to be certified before Perl is...

I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident.

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.

I view the JVM as just another architecture that Perl ought to be ported to. (That, and the Underwood typewriter...

I won't mention any names, because I don't want to get sun4's into trouble...

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

I'd make people say 'use Fork;' if I thought I could get away with it.

If any ideology is so serious that you can't have fun while you're doing it, it's probably too serious.

If someone stinks, view it as a reason to help them, not a reason to avoid them.

If you and I always agree, then one of us is redundant.

If you want your program to be readable, consider supplying the argument.

If you write something wrong enough, I'll be glad to make up a new witticism just for you.

I'm a great believer in visual distinctions.

I'm afraid my gut level reaction is basically, proceed is cute, but cute doesn't cut it in the emergency room.

I'm definitely a night owl. I get going about the time my wife crashes and goes to bed. And in some sense, I've had to learn to be more of a cat napper in recent years because Perl development, Perl design and development, has become a worldwide phenomenon - not just mailing lists, but RSC channels, Twitter even. This all happens 24 hours a day. And people come up with questions at any time of the day or night.

I'm never satisfied because I've been always interested in too many things and I always want to do everything at once.

I'm not too concerned about the future of Perl after me, because I see how these people are interacting with each other and even when I'm not there, they are helping each other and solving each other's problems in a way that I could not do, even if I were there.

I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?

I'm sorry, but you just made me lose my sense of humor, which is deeply regrettable.

In general, they do what you want, unless you want consistency.

Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable.

Information wants to be useful.