Larry Wall Quotes

A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do

When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.

After all, C++ isn't a perfect match for Java's design aims either.

I didn't work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it's not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python.

I would guess that the decision to create a small special purpose language or use an existing general purpose language is one of the toughest decisions that anyone facing the need for a new language must make.

When I announced the development of Perl 6, I said it was going to be a community design. I designed Perl, myself. It's limited by my own brain power. So I wanted Perl 6 to be a community design.

A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.

Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.

At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.

The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous.

Take Lisp, you know its the most beautiful language in the world -- at least up until Haskell came along.

Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.

A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.

A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.

PL/1, the fatal disease, belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.

Perl should remain fast and intuitive (to the extent that it is :-)

The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't appreciate what a powerful language is. Once you learn Lisp you will see what is missing in most other languages.

Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned the language, it's more expressive.

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.

If you're talking about Java in particular, Python is about the best fit you can get amongst all the other languages. Yet the funny thing is, from a language point of view, JavaScript has a lot in common with Python, but it is sort of a restricted subset.

I started out with machine code and assembly language.

The fact that the same symbolic programming primitives work for those as work for math kinds of things, I think, really validates the idea of symbolic programming being something pretty general.

It's very hard to explain to people who don't program, but the object-oriented programming system made programming the Mac and iPhone so easy.

Every market we go to, we have a domain-specific language. Every domain-specific language, underneath, has an architecture.

Ethereum has taken what was a four-function calculator of a programming language in Bitcoin and turned it into a full-fledged computer.