Larry Wall Quotes

So many computer languages try to force you into one way of thinking and Perl is very much the opposite of that approach. It's kind of like a, well, sometimes Perl has been called the Swiss army chainsaw of the internet, but it's more like a Swiss army machine shop. It really gives you a lot of tools, some of which are dangerous, but it lets you get your job done very quickly.

I think that I'm trying to hopefully change my children's ideas about what is possible, and about what is possible for them.

I think there's some great stuff coming. I do feel that. I think we have reached our Harlem Renaissance.

I think Billy Ray has a lot of great stories up his sleeve. I've heard a lot of his plans for the show, should it go forward, and I think there's a lot in store for people, if it's given a chance.

I think maybe there could be some restrictions that there had to be a certain amount of training taken.

An initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer.

Well, you can implement a Perl peek() with unpack('P',...). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity.

Josh Bard is a catcher with excellent defensive tools and someone ... whose best days are ahead of him. He's not coming off his best [offensive] season, but we still think there is some ceiling on him. He has outstanding makeup and calls a good game. [He's] a solid receiver with a plus arm, and he's going to be coming to camp with a chance to open some eyes.

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

I think it took us all by surprise. I mean, I knew that people in New Zealand would like [Hunt for the Wilderpeople], but no one really anticipated how much they would embrace it as it is. And it's playing widely in Australia now; they're running it as well. It's going to be interesting to see how it does it in the States, but I think if Sundance was any indication, I imagine it could do well.

There's more technology in your car than there is in your computer. It's got thousands of parts in it. It's extremely sophisticated, all that robotics.

[Perl] gives you the STDERR filehandle so that your program can make snide comments off to the side while it transforms (or attempts to transform) your input into your output.

LISP has jokingly been described as "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer." I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavour of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.

I started typing diary in, I don't know, 1978 or '79, but then the computer changed that a lot. Because with the computer if you were writing and you realized you had three sentences in a row that started with the word "he," you could fix that right up, whereas on a typewriter you'd think, "Well, I'm not going to change the whole page. It's my diary." So that made a difference.

As long as we place millions of Indians at the centre of our thought process, as long as we think of their welfare, their future, their opportunities for self-realisation we are on the right track.

I think my stuff's kind of obsolete now, you know? I'm making Model Ts or something, and everybody else is making spaceships.

I despise computers in many ways. I think they’re hopelessly underevolved and overrated.

I do everything on the computer. TV is obsolete technology for me.

A most important, but also most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language this influence is, whether we like it or not, an influence on our thinking habits.... A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.

The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.

There really still is a deep wound, you know, in the collective psyche of Pakistan. And the violence has left enormous human and emotional and psychic damage. That's not going to go away. But that said, I think I'm cautiously optimistic that we're looking at a better future.

If I had to guess what the future's going to look like for me - assuming it's not an orange jumpsuit in a hole - I think I'm going to alternate between tech and policy.

It's kind of depressing when you hear the anti-science rhetoric in America, but I think that people are just afraid of change, and I think they're afraid of disruption, and I think they're afraid of the feeling that the rug is being pulled from underneath their feet. People are used to things changing maybe over many generations, but they're not used to seeing things change within their own lifetime. The problem is people are going to college and graduating, and realizing that their major is obsolete.

Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.