Larry Wall Quotes

I really do the conventions now for two reasons.

All conventions are very enjoyable. The more variety you do, the better.

I've agreed to do several Star Trek conventions this coming year.

I haven't been to Comic-Con.

For hard resets, conventions and conferences can be inspiring.

I'm amazed. I go to these conventions, and the fans that come, sometimes my line goes all day.

Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose.

Averages ... seduce us away from minute observation.

Statistics always remind me of fellow who drowned in a river where the average depth was only three feet.

I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.

Years ago, you never concerned yourself with pitch counts. Now, with statistics telling you that between this number and that number bad things happen to this particular pitcher, you have to pay attention to it. The bullpen has become a huge part of what happens now.

Numbers are really fascinating things, and they do play a big part in our lives. They are a language of their own.

Utility is our national shibboleth: the savior of the American businessman is fact and his uterine half-brother, statistics.

Languages that try to disallow idiocy become themselves idiotic.

Its easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it

Surveys show that surveys never lie.

Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.

There are ideas it will be easy to say in the future that we just don't have the language for now.

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

I live my life by the numbers. Not only am I an American, I am an Americanist.

Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.

It's against my programming to impersonate a deity.

We exchanged many frank words in our respective languages.

Only in high school when I began programming computers, did I become interested in tech and start-ups, which led me to attend Stanford and major in Computer Science.

As a matter of principle, I never attend the first annual anything.