Larry Wall Quotes

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

Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible.

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

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

Laziness is a programmers main virtue.

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.

People get annoyed when you try to debug them.

A good messenger expects to get shot.

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

We can debug relationships, but it's always good policy to consider the people themselves to be features. People get annoyed when you try to debug them.

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.

Just don't create a file called '-rf.'

Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?

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

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

I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident.

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

Programmers can be lazy.

Basically there's just so much stuff flowing past on the internet now, you have to let most of it go. And I've grown accustomed to the process of not worrying too much about the stuff I'm not getting to, because the important stuff will come back around.

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

Odd that we think definitions are definitive.

I take time to watch anime. I don't know whether I'm allowed to, but I do it anyway.

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.