Larry Wall Quotes (43 Quotes)

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.

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

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

I don't think it's worth washing hogs over.

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

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

Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.

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

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.

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

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

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

We won't know any of that until that monster moves on through.

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

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

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

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

What you'll need most is courage. It is not an easy path that you've set your foot upon.

Mr. Campbell paints a very rosy picture. It sounds too good to be true because it is too good to be true.

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

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

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

These two storms took the most destructive path over the Gulf that they could.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The three chief virtues of a programmer are: 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.

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

We have the opportunity to produce feedstock to make fabrics like polyesters, plastics for films that wrap our foods, or plastics for things like milk bottles, car parts, all of that. The outcomes are the deliverables.

That is a conservative estimate.

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.

The heart and never-say-die attitude was key. The guys just battled and battled. We've got a lot of guys going both ways, had some key injuries the week before, but a lot of guys stepped up and that's what it's all about.

Beauty What's that.

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

Programmers can be lazy.

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.