Larry Wall Quotes

Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.

In software, consultants sometimes tell you to buy into certain software-development methods to the exclusion of other methods. That’s unfortunate because if you buy into any single methodology 100 percent, you’ll see the whole world in terms of that methodology. In some instances, you’ll miss opportunities to use other methods better suited to your current problem.

There are more ways of skinning a cat than rubbing its fur the wrong way.

There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to frame the problem.

And I also trust that there's more than one way to do something.

You need a group of people who will continually realize that you will run into problems, and for each you will have hundreds or thousands of ways you can approach it.

If you can find an opening, you can probably find a way to float through it.

In a crisis, the man worth his salt is the man who meets the needs of the situation in whatever way is necessary.

Plans get you into things, but you got to work your way out.

Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.

I'm not too concerned about the future of Perl after me, because I see how these people are interacting with each other and even when I'm not there, they are helping each other and solving each other's problems in a way that I could not do, even if I were there.

We should never change our minds about where we are going, but always be curious about different ways to get there.

You continue to change your approach until you achieve what you want using whatever life gives you along the way.

If someone can't give me a good reason why you can't do something, I find a way to do it.

What is an entrepreneur? Someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down.

Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.

You must be interested in finding the best way, not in having your own way.

But of course you can have your cake and eat it, too - if you decide to to bake a second cake. And you may well find that baking two cakes does not take twice the work of baking one.

By the time the average person finishes college, he or she will have taken over 2,600 tests, quizzes, and exams. The right answer approach becomes deeply ingrained in our thinking. This may be fine for some mathematical problems where there is in fact only one right answer. The difficulty is that most of life isn’t this way. Life is ambiguous; there are many right answers- all depending on what you’re looking for. But if you think there is only one right answer, then you’ll stop looking as soon as you find one.

There's always one more way to do something-- your way.

It's not my job to critique the writing. I'm there to serve it. I had to figure out a way to make it work.

There are more ways of killing a cat than choking it with cream.

You can't say to someone with a brain like Morse, This is the way you do it, regardless of the circumstances; this is the way it is done.

The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer

If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.