Larry Wall Quotes

You can do a lot of things with git, and many of the rules of what you *should* do are not so much technical limitations but are about what works well when working together with other people. So git is a very powerful set of tools.

In true open source development, there's lots of visibility all the way through the development process.

There is no schedule. We are all volunteers, so we get it done when we get it done. Perl 5 still works fine, and we plan to take the right amount of time on Perl 6.

The Mozilla project is big in terms of lines of code and complexity.

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

People are still crazy about Python after twenty-five years, which I find hard to believe.

If you think about computer programming, it's as antisocial as it gets.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

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

What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against?

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

While we ended up having several core maintainers use BitKeeper - it was free to use for open source projects - it never got ubiquitous. So it helped kernel development, but there were still pain points.

First, we want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.

People will realize that software is not a product; you use it to build a product.

I think that computer programming shows in my writing. Often when I write about computer programmers I'll write about the way that they see the world and they structure the world.

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.

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?

The most important people is to pick people who like to write software and who are good at... good developers like working with each other. And they... they reinforce each other's skills.

If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

Github is an excellent hosting service; I have nothing against it at all.

I use a lot of humor, and I follow the saying that if you want to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh first, otherwise, they will shoot you. So I can tell you a joke and maybe you will laugh at the beginning. But it's not about telling jokes.

Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is.

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.