Larry Wall Quotes

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

I can be used in various positions.

So many computer languages try to force you into one way of thinking and Perl is very much the opposite of that approach. It's kind of like a, well, sometimes Perl has been called the Swiss army chainsaw of the internet, but it's more like a Swiss army machine shop. It really gives you a lot of tools, some of which are dangerous, but it lets you get your job done very quickly.

Sometimes you find an old tune so good you can use it several times for different purposes.

It's hard to pigeonhole me.

That's what my game is built around: versatility.

That's been a huge recurring thing in growing up - allowing two things to exist in the same space even though, instinctively, they might not be designated to.

The way I work, things are very nuanced; not everything is explained.

I go to each job and open my little briefcase up, and I take out the things that I have or I know. It might be a Swiss army knife, a quart of milk and a ruler. That might be all I can bring to it, but that's what I have.

Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.

I'm not ideological. I think sometimes when people are ideological, the world's a lot easier. Because it falls into either right or wrong, or black or white, or whatever. To me, I'm still trying to figure out a lot of things.

you can make mean anything.

Indecision is the key to flexibility.

I believe in everything - a little bit.

Systems governed by only one set of rules are more vulnerable than those with variety.

I think that life is a paradox and you have to embrace that in your work and your belief systems... You can't be a literalist, and that's the trouble that people always find themselves in. That's why people always hit a wall with any of my stuff, because you can't take it literally.

Our desire to say more grows bigger and what to say about it, except that saying is not always about saying, growing is not always about growing.

A word too much always defeats its purpose.

It's certainly easy to calculate the average attendance for Perl conferences.

You never agree with any one candidate 100 percent. I don't agree with myself 100 percent. You don't even agree with me 100 percent.

Who is apt, on occasion, to assign a multitude of reasons when one will do? This is a sure sign of weakness in argument.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.

Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.