Larry Wall Quotes

People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.

I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.

Computer science is the operating system for all innovation.

I am a programmer.

Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9.

I've been programming computers since elementary school, where they taught us, and I stuck with computer science through high school and college.

The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.

In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe.

At MIT, mostly what I did was documentation. I sort of read things. Wrote some descriptions of various aspects of the file system. Did not really do very much programming at all. At least on Multics.

My dad got me an iMac, and I spent my whole childhood with my eyes glued to it. I was technically savvy and knew how to make it work for me.

My colleagues and I were engineers who worked for DCM's calculator division. These electronic calculators used digital integrated circuits, and then they started using chips. The advanced versions of those chips were used for programmable calculators, which were the forerunners of PCs.

My first introduction to computers and computer programming came during my freshman year of college. I majored in electrical engineering with a minor in computer science, so I learned during my required courses at Vanderbilt University.

[Computer science] is not really about computers and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes... and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments.

I think Leopard is a much better system [than Windows Vista] but OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary.

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.

The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.

To a programmer, an operating system is defined by its API.

FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.

Only in high school when I began programming computers, did I become interested in tech and start-ups, which led me to attend Stanford and major in Computer Science.

Owning a computer without programming is like having a kitchen and using only the microwave oven

FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.

If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result.

Perl programming is an *empirical* science!