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Information wants to be useful.

Larry Wall

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Larry Wall
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: September 27
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Linguist
Programmer
Writer
LA
California
TimToady
Larry Arnold Wall
Useful
Wants
Information

More quotes by Larry Wall

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I don't like this official/unofficial distinction. It sound, er, officious.
Larry Wall
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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
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Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism. More fun, too. Ask any mitochondria.
Larry Wall
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The computer should be doing the hard work. That's what it's paid to do, after all.
Larry Wall
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Sometimes I wish I could put an expiration date on my quotes.
Larry Wall
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The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your resume by a word and a comma.
Larry Wall
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Would you trust the linguistic intuitions of someone who has been studying Latin or Greek for three days?
Larry Wall
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Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.
Larry Wall
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I want to see people using Perl to glue things together creatively, not just technically but also socially.
Larry Wall
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One operator is no big deal. That can be fixed in a jiffy.
Larry Wall
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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
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Well, hey, let's just make everything into a closure, and then we'll have our general garbage collector, installed by 'use less memory'.
Larry Wall
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We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise.
Larry Wall
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I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.
Larry Wall
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Psychotics are consistently inconsistent. The essence of sanity is to be inconsistently inconsistent.
Larry Wall
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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
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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.
Larry Wall
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Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.
Larry Wall
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Lurking is one metaphor that the Omniscience has allowed us to borrow.
Larry Wall
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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