Larry Wall Quotes

I enjoy multi-tasking, so I want to do a lot of different things. I want to keep all the plates spinning.

For me, I think the bigger something is, the more difficult it is to make it nimble and fleet afoot.

I'm a multitasker, and I kind of like it that way.

A playlist can be very versatile, almost like a programming language.

Tech companies are famous for providing freedom for engineers to customize their environments & experiment with new tools... allowing for this freedom helps creativity and productivity.

It's just really efficient to work with a person who can do everything in the studio.

I'm very comfortable with being productive. I like doing things, and I like creating things. As far as being powerful, I guess I'm comfortable with it. It's not really how I think of myself.

Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose.

I think that's a really cool thing about my line. There are so many sets, but you can literally mix and match everything with everything.

Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages.

But why do only unimportant things?" asked Milo, who suddenly remembered how much time he spent each day doing them. "Think of all the trouble it saves," the man explained, and his face looked as if he'd be grinning an evil grin--if he could grin at all. "If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you'll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won't have the time. For there's always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing, and if it weren't for that dreadful magic staff, you'd never know how much time you were wasting.

I have a range, and I'd much rather do things the nice way than the hard way, but sometimes you have to use all the tools at your disposal.

I think that trying to invest through 535 people is a tough job, you know, and so I would give more latitude.

If I worked at White Globe Consulting, I wouldn't be able to do my job. I would spend all day texting the other people in the office, asking them what was going on today and had they heard anything new and what did they think was going to happen. Hmm. Maybe it's a good thing I'm not in an office job.

I didn’t think any biography could do justice to one of the few honest-to-goodness geniuses of our time, a walking paradox who wore a cloak of complexity and elusiveness, but Lisa Rogak has done an exemplary job of it.

I think there is clearly a connection between free time and procrastination. The more you have of the former, all things being equal, the more likely you are to procrastinate.

If you always use your stapler in one place, keep it there, instead of thinking that all the office supplies should go in one place. I've moved a lot of things around in my house because of that.

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of workers in the world, the people who do all the work, and the people who think they do all the work. The latter class is generally the busiest, the former never have time to be busy.

Don't think that you can make up for it by working twice as hard tomorrow. If you have it within your power to work twice as hard, why aren't you doing it now?

I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.

I think the writer's job is to paint the gray because no life is clearly defined.

It's impossible for me to feel like there's only one way to do a thing. There's nothing wrong with having one way of doing it, but I think it's a bad habit. I believe in range. Like, there's a lot of tunes that I play all the time-sometimes I hear 'em in a different register. And if you don't have complete freedom, or you won't let yourself get away from that one straight line, oh, my goodness, that's too horrible to even think about.

I've never seen a job being done by a five-hundred-person engineering team that couldn't be done better by fifty people.

I like to think of myself as versatile, and I certainly have the most varied career, so I'm very, very lucky in that.

Musing on the phrase 'waste of time.' So much more complex than it appears. Many 'wastes of time' small talk, daydreaming are imperatives.