Larry Wall Quotes

The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial chance of introducing another.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

All software sucks.

At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way - and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.

I've noticed that just about every time I find a large program with known glitches that no one seems able to fix, that program is written in C and is likely written by a programming team in a remote location.

If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.

I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.

I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.

In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of possible failures in equipment. That is probably where I learned to rely on multiple safety nets inside and around my systems.

When someone builds a bridge, he uses engineers who have been certified as knowing what they are doing. Yet when someone builds you a software program, he has no similar certification, even though your safety may be just as dependent upon that software working as it is upon the bridge supporting your weight.

It is strange how little harm bad codes do.

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

Linux has never been about quality. There are so many parts of the system that are just these cheap little hacks, and it happens to run.

I'm not saying we purposely introduced bugs or anything, but this is kind of a natural result of any complexities of software... that you can't fully test it.

Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.

If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that. I'll just restart Apache every 10 requests.

Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.

There is an incredibly large spectrum of possible causes for program bugs, including simple typos, "thinkos," hidden limitations of underlying abstractions, and outright bugs in abstractions or their implementation.

Microsoft knows that reliable software is not cost effective. According to studies, 90% to 95% of all bugs are harmless. They're never discovered by users, and they don't affect performance. It's much cheaper to release buggy software and fix the 5% to 10% of bugs people find and complain about.

"Legacy code" often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling.

All real programs contain errors until proved otherwise which is impossible.

Prolific programmers contribute to certain disaster.

With software products, it is usual to find that the software has major 'bugs' and does not work reliably for some users... The lay public, familiar with only a few incidents of software failure, may regard them as exceptions caused by exceptionally inept programmers. Those of us who are software professionals know better; the most competent programmers in the world cannot avoid such problems.

If there is a bug in your code than you have to drop everything you're doing and go fix it.