110+ Larry Wall Quotes On Education, Wall And Canvas

Larry Wall is a Canadian author, best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He is the author of the popular novel "The Darkest Hour" and has written many other works of fiction and non-fiction. He is also an accomplished poet, having published several collections of poetry over the years. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Larry Wall on leadership, education, wall.

Top 10 Larry Wall Quotes

1. Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.
2. Younger hackers are hard to classify. They're probably just as diverse as the old hackers are. We're all over the map.
3. At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.
4. Portability should be the default.
5. For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.
6. I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.
7. Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry.
8. The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.
9. Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism. More fun, too. Ask any mitochondria.
10. Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.

Larry Wall Short Quotes

• Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.
• Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible.
• I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident.
• I take time to watch anime. I don't know whether I'm allowed to, but I do it anyway.
• I note that the Python folks still think they like JPython. I wonder how long that will last?
• A journey of a thousand miles continues with the second step.
• Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.
• I still drive my 1977 Honda Accord. The paint is almost all worn off. It's still running.
• I think computer science, by and large, is still stuck in the Modern age.
• A good messenger expects to get shot.

Larry Wall Quotes About Language

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. — Larry Wall

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. — Larry Wall

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

Take Lisp, you know its the most beautiful language in the world -- at least up until Haskell came along. — Larry Wall

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

It is easier to port a shell than a shell script. — Larry Wall

Think of prototypes as a funny markup language--the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine. — Larry Wall

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

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

Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future. — Larry Wall

Larry Wall Quotes About Code

Many days I don't write any code at all, and some days I spend all day writing code. — Larry Wall

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

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

It's hard to tune heavily tuned code. — Larry Wall

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? — Larry Wall

Larry Wall Quotes About Real

As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be visually distinct. — Larry Wall

Real theology is always rather shocking to people who already think they know what they think. I'm still shocked myself. — Larry Wall

Besides, REAL computers have a rename system call. — Larry Wall

Larry Wall Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

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. — Larry Wall

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

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

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

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

Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi. — Larry Wall

One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures. — Larry Wall

I want to see people using Perl to glue things together creatively, not just technically but also socially. — Larry Wall

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

This does not mean that some of us should not want, in a rather dispassionate sort of way, to put a bullet through csh's head. — Larry Wall

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

Psychotics are consistently inconsistent. The essence of sanity is to be inconsistently inconsistent. — Larry Wall

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

We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise. — Larry Wall

I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary. — Larry Wall

I'm definitely a night owl. I get going about the time my wife crashes and goes to bed. And in some sense, I've had to learn to be more of a cat napper in recent years because Perl development, Perl design and development, has become a worldwide phenomenon - not just mailing lists, but RSC channels, Twitter even. This all happens 24 hours a day. And people come up with questions at any time of the day or night. — Larry Wall

Never put off till tomorrow what you can put off till the day after tomorrow. Like a variant of the song, Tomorrow, only it's more of the idea, the Mexican idea of mañana, you know, [singing] mañana, mañana, I love you, mañana, you're always a day away. — Larry Wall

Don't wear rollerskates to a tug-of-war. — Larry Wall

The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. — Larry Wall

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

[Perl] gives you the STDERR filehandle so that your program can make snide comments off to the side while it transforms (or attempts to transform) your input into your output. — Larry Wall

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

We're really serious about reinventing everything that needs reinventing. — Larry Wall

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

The problems that I really like to solve are our cultural problems. — Larry Wall

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

The autodecrement is not magical. — Larry Wall

The trouble with being quoted a lot is that it makes other people think you're quoting yourself when in fact you're merely repeating yourself. — Larry Wall

Reserve your abuse for your true friends. — Larry Wall

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

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

Yes, but I did manage to increase the amount of virginity in the world by that method. — Larry Wall

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

Call me bored, but don't call me boring. — Larry Wall

Being famous has its benefits, but fame isn't one of them. — Larry Wall

Even the White House has a press agent. — Larry Wall

I am not a sort of person who wants to run a company. — Larry Wall

So many computer languages try to force you into one way of thinking and Perl is very much the opposite of that approach. It's kind of like a, well, sometimes Perl has been called the Swiss army chainsaw of the internet, but it's more like a Swiss army machine shop. It really gives you a lot of tools, some of which are dangerous, but it lets you get your job done very quickly. — Larry Wall

There's often more than one correct thing. There's often more than one right thing. There's often more than one obvious thing. — Larry Wall

Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative. — Larry Wall

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

Laziness is a programmers main virtue. — Larry Wall

Would you trust the linguistic intuitions of someone who has been studying Latin or Greek for three days? — Larry Wall

People get annoyed when you try to debug them. — Larry Wall

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

I've had to learn kind of sense when the questions would be coming and be ready to handle them. There's a lot of education and reiteration that happens on these online channels and sometimes it's tempting to just say, "Well, just go and read the documentation," but you know, people appreciate being led along and taught and mentored. — Larry Wall

That being said, I think we should immediately deprecate any string concatenation that combines '19' with '99'. — Larry Wall

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

Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose. — Larry Wall

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

Information wants to be useful. — Larry Wall

The young think they are immortal, and are determined to prove otherwise. — Larry Wall

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. — Larry Wall

Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable. — Larry Wall

If you're a large corporation, you can afford to pay the money to register patents, but if you're an individual like me, you can't. — Larry Wall

Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context. — Larry Wall

Perl should remain fast and intuitive (to the extent that it is :-) — Larry Wall

Odd that we think definitions are definitive. — Larry Wall

It should be illegal to yell 'Y2K' in a crowded economy. — Larry Wall

Perhaps I'm missing the gene for making enemies. — Larry Wall

If someone stinks, view it as a reason to help them, not a reason to avoid them. — Larry Wall

Well, I think Perl should run faster than C. — Larry Wall

We are so Post-Modern that we don't realize how Post-Modern we are anymore. — Larry Wall

To be a good artist, you have to serve the work of art and allow it to be what it is supposed to be. — Larry Wall

[Boxed] Multiple bouncing balls in a box are a metaphor for community. Notice how the escaping balls explode. This is what happens to people who move from Perl to Ruby. — Larry Wall

I talked about becoming stupid, but I've always been stupid. Fortunately I've been just smart enough to realize that I'm stupid. — Larry Wall

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

What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against? — Larry Wall

I think I'm likely to be certified before Perl is. — Larry Wall

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

The whole intent of Perl 5's module system was to encourage the growth of Perl culture rather than the Perl core. — Larry Wall

You can't have filenames longer than 14 chars. You can't even think about them! — Larry Wall

I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'. — Larry Wall

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. — Larry Wall

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. — Larry Wall

Life Lessons by Larry Wall

1. Larry Wall teaches us to be persistent and never give up on our dreams, no matter how difficult the journey may be.
2. He also encourages us to be open to new ideas and to embrace change, as it can often lead to unexpected opportunities.
3. Finally, he emphasizes the importance of having a positive attitude and believing in yourself, as these can be the keys to success.