Larry Wall Quotes

Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something.

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

Good code is its own best documentation.

Often in writing programs, articulation and clarity are more important than what you actually say.

I am a design chauvinist. I believe that good design is magical and not to be lightly tinkered with. The difference between a great design and a lousy one is in the meshing of the thousand details that either fit or don't, and the spirit of the passionate intellect that has tied them together, or tried. That's why programming - or buying software - on the basis of "lists of features" is a doomed and misguided effort. The features can be thrown together, as in a garbage can, or carefully laid together and interwoven in elegant unification, as in APL, or the Forth language, or the game of chess.

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

You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.

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

It's not what you give, it's the way you give it.

What I do feel with the different scripts that they give me where I feel like this is done for one of those reasons, I share my point of view. I don't just say, "No, thank you." I say, "I feel that this represents Latinos in a wrong way, in a bad way."

You can be strapped to the most stable chair and still feel the world give way beneath you.

Whenever we cannot love in the old, human way . . . God can give us the perfect way.

Gifts count for nothing; will alone is great; All things give way before it, soon or late.

Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities.

[Emacs] is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful.

The man who holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare.

Being relatively unmoved by rewards gives you the incalculable power to go your own way.

If I say [electrons] behave like particles I give the wrong impression; also if I say they behave like waves. They behave in their own inimitable way, which technically could be called a quantum mechanical way. They behave in a way that is like nothing that you have seen before.

Java is C++ without the guns, clubs and knives.

The left are not bipartisan. Somebody give me an example of left-wing bipartisanship. They don't even define it the way we do. Bipartisanship, as they define it, as in we cave on our core beliefs and agree with them. That is bipartisanship. There is no compromise.

Obviously the best way to retain the most profit is to not give any of it away. That's something that you certainly learn through the years.

There is only one way to be happy, and that is to make somebody else so, and you cannot be happy by going cross lots; you have got to go the regular turnpike road.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

Giving is a way of having what you need.

Love is a way of being, not something you give. When a person is truly loving, he is love.