The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your resume by a word and a comma. — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
A Perl program is correct if it gets the job done before your boss fires you. — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is. — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future. — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
Think of prototypes as a funny markup language--the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine. — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
The camel has evolved to be relatively self-sufficient. On the other hand, the camel has not evolved to smell good. Neither has… — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
Take Lisp, you know its the most beautiful language in the world -- at least up until Haskell came along. — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
But the possibility of abuse may be a good reason for leaving capabilities out of other computer languages, it's not a good… — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context. — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy. — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
The problem with using C++ ... is that there's already a strong tendency in the language to require you to know everything… — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks,… — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
Natural languages generally are not designed by humans, they're just designed by the participants and you say something new and somebody else… — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
You don't have to know the whole language to use it usefully, you can do baby talk, you can do grown up… — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
Many computer scientists have fallen into the trap of trying to define languages like George Orwell's Newspeak, in which it is impossible… — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
So many computer languages try to force you into one way of thinking and Perl is very much the opposite of that… — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is… — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once… — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
There's many scripting languages in the world, Perl is a little bit special because it is based more on some ideas from… — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things. — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
Perhaps you should compile your Perl with long doubles one of these megaseconds. — Larry Wall Copy Share
Take Lisp, you know its the most beautiful language in the world -- at least up until Haskell came along. — Larry Wall Copy Share
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? — Larry Wall Copy Share
Yes, but I did manage to increase the amount of virginity in the world by that method. — Larry Wall Copy Share
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… — Larry Wall Copy Share
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… — Larry Wall Copy Share
Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future. — Larry Wall Copy Share
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… — Larry Wall Copy Share
The whole intent of Perl 5's module system was to encourage the growth of Perl culture rather than the Perl core. — Larry Wall Copy Share
