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Larry Wall
302 quotes
“echo $package has manual pages available in source form.echo 'However, you don't have nroff, so they're probably useless to you.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“echo 'Your stdio isn't very std.'”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[End of diatribe. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming...]”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“OOPS! You naughty creature! You didn't run Configure with sh! I will attempt to remedy the situation by running sh for you...”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That means I'll have to use $ans to suppress newlines now.Life is ridiculous.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can't have filenames longer than 14 chars. You can't even think about them!”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your csh still thinks true is false. Write to your vendor today and tell them that next year Configure ought to 'rm /bin/csh' unless they fix their blasted shell.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“/* we have tried to make this normal case as abnormal as possible */”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“s = (char*)(long)retval; /* ouch */”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“signal(i, SIG_DFL); /* crunch, crunch, crunch */”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“if (instr(buf,sys_errlist[errno])) /* you don't see this */”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“/* dbmrefcnt--; */ /* doesn't work, rats */”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“#else /* !STDSTDIO */ /* The big, slow, and stupid way */”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“/* This bit of chicanery makes a unary function followed by a parenthesis into a function with one argument, highest precedence. */”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Does the same as the system call of that name. If you don't know what it does, don't worry about it.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Help save the world!”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you want your program to be readable, consider supplying the argument.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In general, they do what you want, unless you want consistency.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Okay, that's definitely enough hype.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Remember though thatTHERE IS NO GENERAL RULE FOR CONVERTING A LIST INTO A SCALAR.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The autodecrement is not magical.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“*** The previous line contains the naughty word '$&'.\nif /(ibm|apple|awk)/; # :-)”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People understand instinctively that the best way for computer programs to communicate with each other is for each of the them to be strict in what they emit, and liberal in what they accept. The odd thing is that people themselves are not willing to be strict in how they speak, and liberal in how they listen. You'd think that would also be obvious. Instead, we're taught to express ourselves.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But I'm not here to talk about postmodernism. I tried to do that last spring, and afterwards I was thoroughly deconstructed by the deconstructionists for attempting to deconstruct deconstructionism. At least, that's the construction I put on their construction of it. I was talking about postmodern culture, and they thought I was talking about postmodern literature. Not at all the same thing!”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And C was good at something I like to call manipulexity, that is the manipulation of complex things. While shell was good at something else which I call whipuptitude, the aptitude for whipping things up.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So... Perhaps the Perl 6 slogan should be "All Your Paradigms Are Belong To Us". We'll get to that.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How do you type it? With your keyboard.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there's a particular problem that Perl is trying to solve, it's the basic fact that all programming languages suck. Sort of the concept of original sin, applied to programming languages.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are a lotta computer languages out there doing drugs.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Suppose you went back to Ada Lovelace and asked her the difference between a script and a program. She'd probably look at you funny, then say something like: Well, a script is what you give the actors, but a program is what you give the audience. That Ada was one sharp lady...”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I started out as a BASIC programmer. Some people would say that I'm permanently damaged. Some people are undoubtedly right... But I'm not going to apologize for that. All language designers have their occasional idiosyncracies. I'm just better at it than most.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The only reason I've managed to run this open source project, is that I have learned to delegate even the delegation to other people. (final words of the video).”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The State of the Onion", perl.com, 2004-08-18
“...Then you start building things like the Berlin wall to keep people inside your community. In anthropological terms, that's tribalism. A tribal Perl programmer might say, "If you leave the Perl tribe to go and join the Python tribe, we will hunt you down, cook you, and eat you." Or if you join the Ruby tribe, you will explode. By and large, I am not in favor of tribalism. Except for my tribe, of course.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's really no way to fix this and still keep Perl pathologically eclectic.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“…I also discovered Larry's First Law of Language Redesign: Everyone wants the colon.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Apocalypse 1: The Ugly, the Bad, and the Good", perl.com, 2001-04-02
“Larry's 2nd Law of Language Redesign: Larry gets the colon.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Apocalypse 5: Regular Expressions", perl.com, 2001-06-04
“When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct?”
Larry Wall (born 1954) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Perl, the First Postmodern Computer Language", perl.com, 1999-03-09
“Jesse Vincent: My dog is Web 2.0. Prove me wrong. Larry: Does your dog have a long tail? Damian Conway: If you enjoyed these practices, find 245 more like this in this book. Larry: Does your dog have a long tail?”
Larry Wall (born 1954) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: During sessions of YAPC::Asia::2006
“Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible.”
Larry Wall (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source