Technology Quotes by Larry Wall

Portability should be the default.

— Larry Wall

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

— Larry Wall

Laziness is a programmers main virtue.

— Larry Wall

Programmers can be lazy.

— Larry Wall

It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.

— Larry Wall

It is easier to port a shell than a shell script.

— Larry Wall

Besides, REAL computers have a rename system call.

— Larry Wall

Historically speaking, the presence of wheels in Unix has never precluded their reinvention.

— Larry Wall

I think computer science, by and large, is still stuck in the Modern age.

— Larry Wall

Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is.

— Larry Wall

Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.

— Larry Wall

The whole history of computers is rampant with cheerleading at best and bigotry at worst.

— Larry Wall

I note that the Python folks still think they like JPython. I wonder how long that will last?

— Larry Wall

Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.

— Larry Wall

Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context.

— Larry Wall

The problem with using C++ ... is that there's already a strong tendency in the language to require you to know everything…

— Larry Wall

Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to pay another nickel. But hey! You…

— Larry Wall

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

— Larry Wall

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

— Larry Wall

I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.

— Larry Wall

I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very…

— Larry Wall

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

Computer programming is really a lot like writing a recipe. If you've read a recipe, you know what the structure of a…

— Larry Wall

... an initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer.

— Larry Wall

It won't be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all...

— Larry Wall

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

— Larry Wall

The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer.

— Larry Wall

Obviously I was either onto something, or on something.

— Larry Wall

The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.

— Larry Wall

Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.

— Larry Wall

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

— Larry Wall

The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your resume by a word and a comma.

— Larry Wall