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Larry Wall
302 quotes
“Of course, this being Perl, we could always take both approaches.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The random quantum fluctuations of my brain are historical accidents that happen to have decided that the concepts of dynamic scoping and lexical scoping are orthogonal and should remain that way.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm serious about thinking through all the possibilities before we settle on anything. All things have the advantages of their disadvantages, and vice versa.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes we choose the generalization. Sometimes we don't.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wouldn't ever write the full sentence myself, but then, I never use goto either.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's appositival, if it's there. And it doesn't have to be there. And it's really obvious that it's there when it's there.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oh, get ahold of yourself. Nobody's proposing that we parse English.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As with all the other proposals, it's basically just a list of words. You can deal with that...”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I hope I'm not getting so famous that I can't think out load [sic] anymore.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It would be possible to optimize some forms of goto, but I haven't bothered.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How do Crays and Alphas handle the POSIX problem?”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Well, that's more-or-less what I was saying, though obviously addition is a little more cosmic than the bitwise operators.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You tell it that it's indicative by appending $!. That's why we made $! such a short variable name, after all.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you're going to define a shortcut, then make it the base [sic] darn shortcut you can.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's getting harder and harder to think out loud. One of these days someone's gonna go off and kill Thomas a'Becket for me...”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was about to say, 'Avoid fame like the plague,' but you know, they can cure the plague with penicillin these days.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oh, wait, that was Randal...nevermind...”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“P.S. I suppose I really should be nicer to people today, considering I'll be singing in Billy Graham's choir tonight...”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Magically turning people's old scalar contexts into list contexts is a recipe for several kinds of disaster.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And we can always supply them with a program that makes identical files into links to a single file.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wasn't recommending that we make the links for them, only provide them with the tools to do so if they want to take the gamble (or the gambol).”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This has been planned for some time. I guess we'll just have to find someone with an exceptionally round tuit.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“switch (ref $@) { OverflowError => warn 'Dam needs to be drained'; DomainError => warn 'King needs to be trained'; NuclearWarError => die; }”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I surely do hope that's a syntax error.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anyway, my money is still on use strict vars . . .”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you remove stricture from a large Perl program currently, you're just installing delayed bugs, whereas with this feature, you're installing an instant bug that's easily fixed. Whoopee.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't think it's worth washing hogs over.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's certainly easy to calculate the average attendance for Perl conferences.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tcl tends to get ported to weird places like routers.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Historically Tcl has always stored all intermediate results as strings. (With 8.0 they're rethinking that. Of course, Perl rethought that from the start.)”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Just don't make the '9' format pack/unpack numbers...”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that's easier to read. Pardon me. Less difficult to read.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To ordinary folks, conversion is not always automatic. It's something that may or may not require explicit assistance. See Billy Graham.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Well, you can implement a Perl peek() with unpack('P',..). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It may be possible to get this condition from within Perl if a signal handler runs at just the wrong moment. Another point for Chip...”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be visually distinct.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That should probably be written: no !@#$%^&*:@!semicolon”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That gets us out of deciding how to spell Reg[eE]xp?|RE . . . Of course, then we have to decide what ref $re returns...”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'Course, that doesn't work when 'a' contains parentheses.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was trying not to mention backtracking. Which, of course, means that yours is 'righter' than mine, in a theoretical sense.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not that I'm against sneaking some notions into people's heads upon occasion. (Or blasting them in outright.)”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(To the extent that anyone but a Prolog programmer can understand \X totally. (And to the extent that a Prolog programmer can understand 'cut'.)”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source