Core Quote by Larry Wall

Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned…

— Larry Wall

Perl has a long tradition of working around compilers.

— Larry Wall

Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.

— Larry Wall

What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix.

— Erik Naggum

“Perl was designed as a programming language for automating system administration.”

— Mike Loukides

At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.

— Larry Wall

It's not that Perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has…

— Erik Naggum

Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose.

— Larry Wall

There's many scripting languages in the world, Perl is a little bit special because it is based more on some ideas from the way…

— Larry Wall

But the possibility of abuse may be a good reason for leaving capabilities out of other computer languages, it's not a good reason for…

— Larry Wall

The only reason [not to use] perl is that some sysadmins don't allow software that they didn't pay for. By all means, let them…

— Larry Wall

As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be visually distinct.

— Larry Wall