Top 180 Larry Wall Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Laziness is a programmer’s main virtue.”

— Larry Wall

Featured in: Funny Quotes, Programming Quotes, Virtue Quotes

2. “Programmers can be lazy.”

— Larry Wall

Featured in: IT Quotes, Humor Quotes

3. “Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.”

— Larry Wall

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

— Larry Wall

5. “Well, I think Perl should run faster than C.”

— Larry Wall

6. “There’s a saying in the software design industry: “Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two.””

— Larry Wall

Featured in: Programming Quotes

7. “Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible.”

— Larry Wall

8. “People get annoyed when you try to debug them.”

— Larry Wall

9. “A journey of a thousand miles continues with the second step.”

— Larry Wall

10. “Many days I don’t write any code at all, and some days I spend all day writing code.”

— Larry Wall

11. “Call me bored, but don’t call me boring.”

— Larry Wall

12. “The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.”

— Larry Wall

13. “You can’t change the past. You can’t even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives.”

— Larry Wall

14. “At many levels, Perl is a ‘diagonal’ language.”

— Larry Wall

15. “Computer programming is really a lot like writing a recipe. If you’ve read a recipe, you know what the structure of a recipe is, it’s got some things up at the top that are your ingredients, and below that, the directions for how to deal with those ingredients.”

— Larry Wall

16. “A good messenger expects to get shot.”

— Larry Wall

17. “Although the Perl Slogan is There’s More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something.”

— Larry Wall

18. “Being famous has its benefits, but fame isn’t one of them.”

— Larry Wall

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

— Larry Wall

20. “For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.”

— Larry Wall

21. “The computer should be doing the hard work. That’s what it’s paid to do, after all.”

— Larry Wall

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

— Larry Wall

23. “Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism. More fun, too. Ask any mitochondria.”

— Larry Wall

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

— Larry Wall

25. “Just don’t create a file called.”

— Larry Wall

26. “A Perl program is correct if it gets the job done before your boss fires you.”

— Larry Wall

27. “If you and I always agree, then one of us is redundant.”

— Larry Wall

28. “Think of prototypes as a funny markup language – the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine.”

— Larry Wall

29. “The camel has evolved to be relatively self-sufficient. On the other hand, the camel has not evolved to smell good. Neither has Perl.”

— Larry Wall

30. “I think it’s a new feature. Don’t tell anyone it was an accident.”

— Larry Wall

31. “You want it in one line? Does it have to fit in 80 columns?”

— Larry Wall

32. “Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.”

— Larry Wall

33. “Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.”

— Larry Wall

34. “The potential of greater good goes right along with the potential for greater evil.”

— Larry Wall

35. “I procrastinate, but mostly because there’s always too many things to do, and I got the stew in my mind that things do bubble up, so I’ll throw things in there and let them stew around. It’s sort of like greasing the squeaky wheels in my own brain.”

— Larry Wall

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

— Larry Wall

37. “The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they’re all inconsistent with each other.”

— Larry Wall

38. “To Perl, or not to Perl, that is the kvetching.”

— Larry Wall

39. “A lazy person will try to always find some way to do something; they’ll always be looking for ways of doing something faster, more efficiently, and if you really want to control the world, that’s a really sort of hubristic notion – excessive pride, the thing that Zeus zaps you for having.”

— Larry Wall

40. “There’s some entertainment value in watching people juggle nitroglycerin.”

— Larry Wall

41. “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.”

— Larry Wall

42. “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.”

— Larry Wall

43. “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.”

— Larry Wall

44. “Though I’ll admit readability suffers slightly...”

— Larry Wall

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

— Larry Wall

46. “Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.”

— Larry Wall

47. “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...”

— Larry Wall

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

— Larry Wall

49. “Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose.”

— Larry Wall

50. “Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry.”

— Larry Wall