Larry Wall Language Quotations

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

Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.

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

Think of prototypes as a funny markup language--the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine.

You can prove anything by mentioning another computer language.

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

As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language.

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

Natural languages generally are not designed by humans, they're just designed by the participants and you say something new and somebody else says, "Oh, that's a cool way to say it," and the next thing you know, everyone is saying it because it's shiny.

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

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

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

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