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
There's often more than one correct thing. There's often more than one right thing. There's often more than one obvious thing. — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
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 Image
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
I try not to confuse roles and traits in my own life. Being the Perl god is a role. Being a stubborn… — 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
“The overall intent is to make everyone sufficiently happy (or in some cases, insufficiently unhappy).” — Larry Wall Happiness Copy Share Image
If you consistently take an antagonistic approach, however, people are going to start thinking you're from New York. — Larry Wall Antagonistic Copy Share Image
We can debug relationships, but it's always good policy to consider the people themselves to be features. People get annoyed when you… — 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
Life gets boring, someone invents another necessity, and once again we turn the crank on the screwjack of progress hoping that nobody… — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
I want to see people using Perl to glue things together creatively, not just technically but also socially. — 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
Somebody out there is going to do something that's far more surprising than anything that I would do. I was surprised by… — Larry Wall First place 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 Ada Copy Share Image
And in the limiting case where the optimizer is completely broken because it's not implemented yet, we get to work around that… — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
If you're a large corporation, you can afford to pay the money to register patents, but if you're an individual like me,… — Larry Wall Corporations Copy Share Image
I'm afraid my gut level reaction is basically, proceed is cute, but cute doesn't cut it in the emergency room. — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is… — Larry Wall Children Copy Share Image
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… — Larry Wall Funny Copy Share Image
I want people to use Perl. I want to be a positive ingredient of the world and make my American history. So,… — Larry Wall American history Copy Share Image
A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy. — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of… — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
To ordinary folks, conversion is not always automatic. It's something that may or may not require explicit assistance. See Billy Graham. — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
Not that I'm against sneaking some notions into people's heads upon occasion. (Or blasting them in outright. — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
Maybe we should take a clue from FTP and put in an option like 'print hash marks on every 1024 iterations'. — Larry Wall Copy Share Image
