Larry Wall

1954– · American computer programmer and author

Topics: programming, software design, software engineering, unix

• Well, enough clowning around. Perl is, in intent, a cleaned up and summarized version of that wonderful semi-natural language known as 'Unix'.

  — Larry Wall

• Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

  — Larry Wall

• 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

• <code>signal(i, SIG_DFL); /* crunch, crunch, crunch */</code>

  — Larry Wall

• There are probably better ways to do that, but it would make the parser more complex. I do, occasionally, struggle feebly against complexity...

  — Larry Wall

• 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

• Life gets boring, someone invents another necessity, and once again we turn the crank on the screwjack of progress hoping that nobody gets screwed.

  — Larry Wall

• It is, of course, written in Perl. Translation to C is left as an exercise for the reader.

  — Larry Wall

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

  — Larry Wall

• Accidental stacks considered harmful.

  — Larry Wall

• It's easy to solve the halting problem with a shotgun.

  — Larry Wall

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

  — Larry Wall

• That being said, I think we should immediately deprecate any string concatenation that combines '19' with '99'.

  — Larry Wall

• I'd put my money where my mouth is, but my mouth keeps moving.

  — Larry Wall

• 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

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

  — Larry Wall

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

  — Larry Wall

• <code>echo 'Congratulations. You aren't running Eunice.</code>

  — Larry Wall

• It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.

  — Larry Wall

• The whole history of computers is rampant with cheerleading at best and bigotry at worst.

  — Larry Wall