Larry Wall Quotes

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

In a chemistry class there was a guy sitting in front of me doing what looked like a jigsaw puzzle or some really weird kind of thing. He told me he was writing a computer program.

Somebody writing a subroutine is unbelievable boring.

I am a programmer.

I'm really good at making software for publishing.

Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.

All of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school - my number one piece of advice is: You should learn how to program.

Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.

I started to write a new editor not too long ago and had it about half done after two days.

Even though I had the talent, programming just didn't feel right. I never considered it very seriously. Some people get gratification from bending a machine to their will. I didn't.

There was something amazingly enticing about programming.

I've been programming computers since elementary school, where they taught us, and I stuck with computer science through high school and college.

I'm thinking of going to programming school. Learn how to sit down at any computer and learn to do anything on it. That's all I have left and have interest in.

You might not think that programmers are artists, but programming is an extremely creative profession. It's logic-based creativity.

I'm not technical.

We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.

The computer would do anything you programmed it to do.

Code writers, they are my idols.

I'm kind of a retired software engineer. I don't write code anymore.

The only thing I understand deeply, because in my teens I was thinking about it, and every year of my life, is software. So I'll never be hands-on on anything except software.

I was a programmer.

I worked as a programmer for 16 years.

Teaching someone to program is like giving them a superpower.