Larry Wall Quotes

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

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.

Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.

Perl has a long tradition of working around compilers.

[Emacs] is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful.

Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.

A lot of the websites built through the 1990s used Perl. The first webmaster of Sun Microsystems coined a wonderful phrase. He said Perl is the duck tape of the Internet - it's this language that people would write all these scripts that make things just work.

What's kept Java from being used as widely as possible is there hasn't been an Open Source implementation of it that's gotten really widespread use.

I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'.

Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages.

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

The only reason [not to use] perl is that some sysadmins don't allow software that they didn't pay for. By all means, let them send me money if it makes them feel better.

Sometimes, the elegant implementation is just a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function.

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

Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

To Perl , or not to Perl, that is the kvetching.

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

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

It used to be the program's purpose to instruct our computers; it became the computer's purpose to execute our programs.

My own personal dream is that the majority of the web runs on open source software.

Of course, C proved indispensible to the developers of all its alternatives. Dig down through enough implementation layers under any of the other languages surveyed here and you will find a core implemented in pure, portable C

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.

[Perl] combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript.

Tom [Cargil]s suggestion with a further idea: Propsers of new [C++] features should be required to donate a kidney. That would - Jim [Waldo] pointed out - make people think hard before proposing, and even people without any sense would propose at most two extensions.

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.