Larry Wall Quotes

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

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.

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

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

There's an old maxim that says, 'Things that work persist,' which is why there's still Cobol floating around.

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.

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.

From day one our next generation system will run all our exsisting software - so that gives us a head start.

Why should someone have to retrain themselves to use a new application that does the same basic thing as the old application, just because something as trivial as the operating system changed out from under them?

Well, the first thing to say is that we've worked hard to maintain compatibility, so that any program written with an earlier version of Mathematica can run without change in 3.0, and any notebook can be converted.

I am greatly proud of the fact that 'Doom' is one of those things where everything that has a 32-bit processor has had 'Doom' run on it, and I think that's been one of the great aspects of having it be open source: having everything out there means that people have maintained that and kept it up to date.

Ethereum has taken what was a four-function calculator of a programming language in Bitcoin and turned it into a full-fledged computer.

I write almost entlirely on Macs, because: Windows gives me hives.

Putting Windows [3.11] on top of DOS is like putting whipped cream on a road apple [horse poop].

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.

Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.

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

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

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

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.

XML is not a language in the sense of a programming language any more than sketches on a napkin are a language.

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

I think I'm likely to be certified before Perl is.

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?

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