Top 180 Larry Wall Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Save it for my unauthorized autobiography.”

— Larry Wall

152. “It’s hard to tune heavily tuned code.”

— Larry Wall

153. “Any false value is gonna be fairly boring in Perl, mathematicians notwithstanding.”

— Larry Wall

154. “Accidental stacks considered harmful.”

— Larry Wall

155. “I’m afraid my gut level reaction is basically, proceed is cute, but cute doesn’t cut it in the emergency room.”

— Larry Wall

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

— Larry Wall

157. “The problems that I really like to solve are our cultural problems.”

— Larry Wall

158. “Would you trust the linguistic intuitions of someone who has been studying Latin or Greek for three days?”

— Larry Wall

159. “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.”

— Larry Wall

160. “If you want your program to be readable, consider supplying the argument.”

— Larry Wall

161. “To ordinary folks, conversion is not always automatic. It’s something that may or may not require explicit assistance. See Billy Graham.”

— Larry Wall

162. “You can prove anything by mentioning another computer language.”

— Larry Wall

163. “Well, you know, Hubbard had a bunch of people sworn to commit suicide when he died. So of course he never officially died...”

— Larry Wall

164. “It’s certainly easy to calculate the average attendance for Perl conferences.”

— Larry Wall

165. “I’m a great believer in visual distinctions.”

— Larry Wall

166. “We are so Post-Modern that we don’t realize how Post-Modern we are anymore.”

— Larry Wall

167. “I still drive my 1977 Honda Accord. The paint is almost all worn off. It’s still running.”

— Larry Wall

168. “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.”

— Larry Wall

169. “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.”

— Larry Wall

170. “I am not a sort of person who wants to run a company.”

— Larry Wall

171. “You can’t have filenames longer than 14 chars. You can’t even think about them!”

— Larry Wall

172. “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.”

— Larry Wall

173. “Let us be charitable, and call it a misleading feature.”

— Larry Wall

174. “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.”

— Larry Wall

175. “Yes, but I did manage to increase the amount of virginity in the world by that method.”

— Larry Wall

176. “It won’t be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all...”

— Larry Wall

177. “I think that’s easier to read. Pardon me. Less difficult to read.”

— Larry Wall

178. “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.”

— Larry Wall

179. “Not that I have anything much against redundancy. But I said that already.”

— Larry Wall

180. “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.”

— Larry Wall

181. “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...”

— Larry Wall

182. “I’d make people say ‘use Fork;’ if I thought I could get away with it.”

— Larry Wall

183. “Garbage is usually construed as useless complexity.”

— Larry Wall

184. “Psychotics are consistently inconsistent. The essence of sanity is to be inconsistently inconsistent.”

— Larry Wall