Top 220 Quotes & Sayings by Larry Wall

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.

To be a good artist, you have to serve the work of art and allow it to be what it is supposed to be.

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.

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

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

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.

We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.

Programmers can be lazy.

For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.

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

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

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.

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.

Many days I don't write any code at all, and some days I spend all day writing code.

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

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

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

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.

Somebody out there is going to do something that's far more surprising than anything that I would do. I was surprised by the whole web thing in the first place.

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.

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

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

Psychotics are consistently inconsistent. The essence of sanity is to be inconsistently inconsistent.

Odd that we think definitions are definitive.

The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other.

True greatness is measured by how much freedom you give to others, not by how much you can coerce others to do what you want.

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

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

Obviously I was either onto something, or on something.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.

There's some entertainment value in watching people juggle nitroglycerin.

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

Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.

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.

Laziness is a programmers main virtue.

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.

A good messenger expects to get shot.

I've decided I don't want to be a manager. Every time you try to be responsive to your employees, they say you're being reactive and not proactive. And when you try to be proactive, they accuse you of being capricious and arbitrary. So I don't wanna be a manager.

You can’t change the past. You can’t even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives.

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

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.

So many computer languages try to force you into one way of thinking and Perl is very much the opposite of that approach. It's kind of like a, well, sometimes Perl has been called the Swiss army chainsaw of the internet, but it's more like a Swiss army machine shop. It really gives you a lot of tools, some of which are dangerous, but it lets you get your job done very quickly.