Larry Wall Quotes

The programmer's primary weapon in the never-ending battle against slow system is to change the intramodular structure. Our first response should be to reorganize the modules' data structures.

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

The most special Slam is Wimbledon, of course. But where I feel the best is Melbourne. And you're happy that you're playing. When you get to the middle of the season, everything is week after week, and it's all routine. But when it's Melbourne in January, you are fresh and you want to play. It's nice.

Because of the Turing completeness theory, everything one Turing-complete language can do can theoretically be done by another Turing-complete language, but at a different cost. You can do everything in assembler, but no one wants to program in assembler anymore.

No one wants one language. There are applications when it's appropriate to write something in C rather than in Java. If you want to write something where performance is much more important than extensibility, then you might want to choose C rather than Java.

There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.

In motorsports we work in the grey areas a lot. You're trying to find where the holes are in the rule book.

Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system.

It's difficult to build services that are supposed to scale to, you know, 30, 50, 100 million users right off the bat because they got to be kind of tailored down; by definition, they have to be a little bit generic to speak to that large of an audience.

People expect you to play your best, so I go through a routine to prepare myself so that I know I'm physically and mentally ready - prepared for the game.

There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified. It is often a mistake to make a priori judgments about what parts of a program are really critical, since the universal experience of programmers who have been using measurement tools has been that their intuitive guesses fail.

I love computer programmers. They have a very beautiful definition of complexity as 'the capacity to transmit the maximum information with the minimum data'.

I don't drive by the seat of my pants and happen to win races. I work very hard to interpret the data and drive a certain way. My engineers have confidence in me, and more often than not, when I tell them what I need or what I am feeling with the car, it's right.

I choose not to believe in superstitions. On race day, I have plans that I follow. I don't necessarily think about brushing my hair a certain way or doing certain things that make no sense as it relates to my performance.

We are pushing the limits on the chassis and the engine sides a lot in order to have a competitive car, and this is why we are winning races, but also, if you push the limits at a certain stage, you find them.

It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.

Compilers resemble gluttonous eaters who devour excessive quantities of healthy food just to excrete them as refuse.

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Developing a compiler was a logical move; but in matters like this, you don't run against logic - you run against people who can't change their minds.

The definition of adventure depends upon how boring your life is.

It would be possible to optimize some forms of goto, but I haven't bothered.

Rule 1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%

...a figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition.