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Inspirational Quotes by Larry Wall

54 Inspirational quotes by Larry Wall

All Inspirational quotes Larry Wall’s page

A programmer’s arthritic pinkies ache just thinking about ||||=, showing Wall’s playful take on code pain. He jokes that switching grammars after ‘use strict subs’ is doable, and that declaring something portable is always risky. He also believes it’s better to write something first and then explain why it works.

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Let us be charitable, and call it a misleading feature

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Odd that we think definitions are definitive.

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What about WRITING it first and rationalizing it afterwards?

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A good messenger expects to get shot.

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It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.

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Just don't create a file called.

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

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That which hits the fan tends to get flung in all directions.

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Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible.

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Well, you can implement a Perl peek() with unpack('P',...). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity.

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I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident.

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I just hope I'm never promoted to the level of my incontinence.

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We're really serious about reinventing everything that needs reinventing.

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It's appositival, if it's there. And it doesn't have to be there. And it's really obvious that it's there when it's there.

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Must be a different Larry Wall. There are at least 137 of us in the U.S.

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The computer should be doing the hard work. That's what it's paid to do, after all.

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And in the limiting case where the optimizer is completely broken because it's not implemented yet, we get to work around that…

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The way I see it, if you declare something portable, you'll always be wrong, and if you declare it non-portable, you'll always…

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Even the White House has a press agent.

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Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry.

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For the sake of argument I'll ignore all your fighting words.

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And I don't like doing silly things (except on purpose).

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I don't believe I've ever cuddled my elses.

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Reserve your abuse for your true friends.

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Though I'll admit readability suffers slightly...

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Are you perchance running on a 64-bit machine?

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Save it for my unauthorized autobiography.

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Laziness is a programmers main virtue.

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One operator is no big deal. That can be fixed in a jiffy.

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I think I'll side with the pissheads on this one.

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Don't wear rollerskates to a tug-of-war.

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Information wants to be useful.

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Accidental stacks considered harmful.

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It's there as a sop to former Ada programmers.

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Call me bored, but don't call me boring.

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Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality...

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Sometimes I wish I could put an expiration date on my quotes.

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It should be illegal to yell 'Y2K' in a crowded economy.

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Perhaps you should compile your Perl with long doubles one of these megaseconds.

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The potential of greater good goes right along with the potential for greater evil.

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More by Larry Wall

Not that I have anything much against redundancy. But I said that already.

Perhaps you should compile your Perl with long doubles one of these megaseconds.

Take Lisp, you know its the most beautiful language in the world -- at least up until Haskell came along.

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?

Yes, but I did manage to increase the amount of virginity in the world by that method.

I won't mention any names, because I don't want to get sun4's into trouble.

And besides, if Perl really takes off in the Windows space, I think the rest of us would just as soon have a double-agent…

In general, they do what you want, unless you want consistency.

I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'.

While I have historically been a late worker, you know, sometimes I even like to get up early and see what's happened in the…

All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory...

Perl has a long tradition of working around compilers.

Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.

We can debug relationships, but it's always good policy to consider the people themselves to be features. People get annoyed when you try to…

The whole intent of Perl 5's module system was to encourage the growth of Perl culture rather than the Perl core.