Top 180 Larry Wall Quotes (2023 Update)
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51. “Perl doesn’t have an infatuation with enforced privacy. It would prefer that you stayed out of its living room because you weren’t invited, not because it has a shotgun.”

— Larry Wall

52. “I’ve decided I don’t want to be a manager. Every time you try to be responsive to your employees, they say you’re being reactive and not proactive. And when you try to be proactive, they accuse you of being capricious and arbitrary. So I don’t wanna be a manager...”

— Larry Wall

53. “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.”

— Larry Wall

54. “Real theology is always rather shocking to people who already think they know what they think. I’m still shocked myself.”

— Larry Wall

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

— Larry Wall

56. “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

57. “I was raised a musician and I played classic music, violin, in orchestras and music comedy theaters, I have music running around in my head all the time, and if I hear music that’s too interesting, I have to pay attention to it.”

— Larry Wall

58. “I think I’ll side with the pissheads on this one.”

— Larry Wall

59. “It is easier to port a shell than a shell script.”

— Larry Wall

60. “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 leaving capabilities out of Perl .”

— Larry Wall

61. “Don’t wear rollerskates to a tug-of-war.”

— Larry Wall

62. “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.”

— Larry Wall

63. “Younger hackers are hard to classify. They’re probably just as diverse as the old hackers are. We’re all over the map.”

— Larry Wall

64. “I wouldn’t ever write the full sentence myself, but then, I never use goto either.”

— Larry Wall

65. “When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi.”

— Larry Wall

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

— Larry Wall

67. “This job of playing God is a little too big for me. Nevertheless, someone has to do it, so I’ll try my best to fake it.”

— Larry Wall

68. “Well, coffee is my drug of choice, generally, with a little bit of Pepsi here and there, if I need more sugar. But yeah, if I could do intravenous coffee, I would. But I guess that’s pretty standard.”

— Larry Wall

69. “Sometimes I wish I could put an expiration date on my quotes.”

— Larry Wall

70. “If any ideology is so serious that you can’t have fun while you’re doing it, it’s probably too serious.”

— Larry Wall

71. “It would be possible to optimize some forms of goto, but I haven’t bothered.”

— Larry Wall

72. “Orthogonality for orthogonality’s sake is not something I’m keen on.”

— Larry Wall

73. “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

74. “The autodecrement is not magical.”

— Larry Wall

75. “When’s the last time you used duct tape on a duct?”

— Larry Wall

76. “It’s easy to solve the halting problem with a shotgun.”

— Larry Wall

77. “The young think they are immortal, and are determined to prove otherwise.”

— Larry Wall

78. “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.”

— Larry Wall

79. “What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against?”

— Larry Wall

80. “Are you perchance running on a 64-bit machine?”

— Larry Wall

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

— Larry Wall

82. “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.”

— Larry Wall

83. “Information wants to be useful.”

— Larry Wall

84. “For the sake of argument I’ll ignore all your fighting words.”

— Larry Wall

85. “Information doesn’t want to be free. Information wants to be valuable.”

— Larry Wall

86. “You don’t have to know the whole language to use it usefully, you can do baby talk, you can do grown up talk, you can cuss in it, you can write poetry, you can be a playwright, is sort of the idea.”

— Larry Wall

87. “Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.”

— Larry Wall

88. “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.”

— Larry Wall

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

— Larry Wall

90. “It should be illegal to yell ‘Y2K’ in a crowded economy.”

— Larry Wall

91. “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.”

— Larry Wall

92. “Perl has a long tradition of working around compilers.”

— Larry Wall

93. “True greatness is measured by how much freedom you give to others, not by how much you can coerce others to do what you want.”

— Larry Wall

94. “We’re really serious about reinventing everything that needs reinventing.”

— Larry Wall

95. “Some of modern engineering is necessary to good art. But I think of myself is a cultural artist.”

— Larry Wall

96. “It’s there as a sop to former Ada programmers.”

— Larry Wall

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

— Larry Wall

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

— Larry Wall

99. “Perhaps I’m missing the gene for making enemies.”

— Larry Wall

100. “Perhaps you should compile your Perl with long doubles one of these megaseconds.”

— Larry Wall