Larry Wall is a computer programmer and author, most widely known as the creator of the Perl programming language... (wikipedia)
The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.
Younger hackers are hard to classify. They're probably just as diverse as the old hackers are. We're all over the map.
Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.
I take time to watch anime. I don't know whether I'm allowed to, but I do it anyway.
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 the language, it's more expressive.
The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.
I want people to use Perl. I want to be a positive ingredient of the world and make my American history. So, whatever it takes to give away my software and get it used, that's great.
Many days I don't write any code at all, and some days I spend all day writing code.
The world has become a larger place. The universe has been expanding, and Perl's been expanding along with the universe.
To be a good artist, you have to serve the work of art and allow it to be what it is supposed to be.
I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it.
Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.
I talked about becoming stupid, but I've always been stupid. Fortunately I've been just smart enough to realize that I'm stupid.
We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise.
I think computer science, by and large, is still stuck in the Modern age.
I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.
If any ideology is so serious that you can't have fun while you're doing it, it's probably too serious.
There is no schedule. We are all volunteers, so we get it done when we get it done. Perl 5 still works fine, and we plan to take the right amount of time on Perl 6.
I'm never satisfied because I've been always interested in too many things and I always want to do everything at once.
Some of modern engineering is necessary to good art. But I think of myself is a cultural artist.
The problems that I really like to solve are our cultural problems.
We are so Post-Modern that we don't realize how Post-Modern we are anymore.
One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.
Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.
I still drive my 1977 Honda Accord. The paint is almost all worn off. It's still running.
I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.
If you're a large corporation, you can afford to pay the money to register patents, but if you're an individual like me, you can't.
Somebody out there is going to do something that's far more surprising than anything that I would do. I was surprised by the whole web thing in the first place.
When I announced the development of Perl 6, I said it was going to be a community design. I designed Perl, myself. It's limited by my own brain power. So I wanted Perl 6 to be a community design.
I am not a sort of person who wants to run a company.
I'm just paid to do whatever I want to do. Some of the time it's development, and some of the time it's just goofing off.
The refineries aren't going anywhere. There is too much invested in them here and companies wouldn't be working this hard to rebuild if they were thinking of moving.
When Ivan hit last year, it passed over 150 platforms.
Mr. Campbell paints a very rosy picture. It sounds too good to be true because it is too good to be true.
I don't think it's worth washing hogs over.
That was huge, in a 7-7 game to give us great field position. That was probably the difference in the football game right there.
We're still trying to get a handle on this thing, but it is too soon to put firm numbers on the damage. This is one of the worst calamities we've been through and it is one of the worst I've seen as far as hurricane damage.
We have the opportunity to produce feedstock to make fabrics like polyesters, plastics for films that wrap our foods, or plastics for things like milk bottles, car parts, all of that. The outcomes are the deliverables.
We won't know any of that until that monster moves on through.
You can't build new ones, so you keep what you have.
The storm caused the Gulf of Mexico to be evacuated.
About a third of the nation's refining capacity is either down or in peril, ... you will see prices go up. But it will be only temporary.
These two storms took the most destructive path over the Gulf that they could.
It has been very hard for these companies, because many of them first had to locate their workers who had been evacuated and now have to deal with problems of access to their facilities.
Just don't create a file called.
Many computer scientists have fallen into the trap of trying to define languages like George Orwell's Newspeak, in which it is impossible to think bad thoughts. What they end up doing is killing the creativity of programming.
My arthritic pinkies are already starting to ache just thinking about ||||=.
One operator is no big deal. That can be fixed in a jiffy.
Well, you can implement a Perl peek() with unpack('P',...). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity.
It would be possible to optimize some forms of goto, but I haven't bothered.
The random quantum fluctuations of my brain are historical accidents that happen to have decided that the concepts of dynamic scoping and lexical scoping are orthogonal and should remain that way.
It is my job in life to travel all roads, so that some may take the road less travelled, and others the road more travelled, and all have a pleasant day.
Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.
The whole history of computers is rampant with cheerleading at best and bigotry at worst.
Odd that we think definitions are definitive.
Let us be charitable, and call it a misleading feature
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi.
The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other.
Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry.
In general, they do what you want, unless you want consistency.
Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.
And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is.
The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your resume by a word and a comma.
Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to pay another nickel. But hey! You only feel 5 cents poorer each time.
Real theology is always rather shocking to people who already think they know what they think. I'm still shocked myself.
Call me bored, but don't call me boring.
The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer.
As someone pointed out, you could have an attribute that says 'optimize the heck out of this routine', and your definition of heck would be a parameter to the optimizer.
You can never entirely stop being what you once were. That's why it's important to be the right person today, and not put it off till tomorrow.
Think of prototypes as a funny markup language--the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine.
And I don't like doing silly things (except on purpose).
As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be visually distinct.
It's certainly easy to calculate the average attendance for Perl conferences.
Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.
Even if you aren't in doubt, consider the mental welfare of the person who has to maintain the code after you, and who will probably put parens in the wrong place.
So please don't think I have a 'down' on the MVS people. I'm just pulling off their arms to beat other people over the head with.
Maybe we should take a clue from FTP and put in an option like 'print hash marks on every 1024 iterations'.
Perhaps you should compile your Perl with long doubles one of these megaseconds.
There's some entertainment value in watching people juggle nitroglycerin.
Well, you know, Hubbard had a bunch of people sworn to commit suicide when he died. So of course he never officially died...
Are you perchance running on a 64-bit machine?
It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.
The computer should be doing the hard work. That's what it's paid to do, after all.
Reserve your abuse for your true friends.
Well, hey, let's just make everything into a closure, and then we'll have our general garbage collector, installed by 'use less memory'.
I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'.
Wow, I'm being shot at from both sides. That means I *must* be right.
To ordinary folks, conversion is not always automatic. It's something that may or may not require explicit assistance. See Billy Graham.
Psychotics are consistently inconsistent. The essence of sanity is to be inconsistently inconsistent.
I don't believe I've ever cuddled my elses.
It should be illegal to yell 'Y2K' in a crowded economy.
Would you trust the linguistic intuitions of someone who has been studying Latin or Greek for three days?
I try not to confuse roles and traits in my own life. Being the Perl god is a role. Being a stubborn cuss is a trait.
And in the limiting case where the optimizer is completely broken because it's not implemented yet, we get to work around that too. Optionally...
We don't have enough parallel universes to allow all uses of all junction types--in the absence of quantum computing the combinatorics are not in our favor...
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 within ActiveState.
Accidental stacks considered harmful.
Orthogonality for orthogonality's sake is not something I'm keen on.
Must be a different Larry Wall. There are at least 137 of us in the U.S.