Larry Wall Quotes - Page 8

It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.

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

I don't believe I've ever cuddled my elses.

It's appositival, if it's there. And it doesn't have to be there. And it's really obvious that it's there when it's there.

Accidental stacks considered harmful.

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.

The way I see it, if you declare something portable, you'll always be wrong, and if you declare it non-portable, you'll always be right.

It's easy to solve the halting problem with a shotgun.

Must be a different Larry Wall. There are at least 137 of us in the U.S.

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.

Well, you can implement a Perl peek() with unpack('P',...). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity.

Historically speaking, the presence of wheels in Unix has never precluded their reinvention.

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

If you consistently take an antagonistic approach, however, people are going to start thinking you're from New York.

A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.

Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.

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

Besides, REAL computers have a rename system call.

Younger hackers are hard to classify. They're probably just as diverse as the old hackers are. We're all over the map.

I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.

There is, however, a strange, musty smell in the air that reminds me of something...hmm...yes...I've got it...there's a VMS nearby, or I'm a Blit.

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

An initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer.

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

Though I'll admit readability suffers slightly.