Larry Wall Quotes

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.

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

Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.

Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.

We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.

I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

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

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.

English is a very expressive language.

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

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.

FORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.

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

I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?

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

Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

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.

I'd make people say 'use Fork;' if I thought I could get away with it.

Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.

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

Perl has a long tradition of working around compilers.

Perl doesn't have an infatuation with enforced privacy. It would prefer that you stayed out of its living room because you weren't invited, not because it has a shotgun

Human, Allen, is an adjective, and its use as a noun is in itself regrettable.

I never actually learned the rules of grammar, relying instead only on what sounded right.