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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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Larry Wall
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: September 27
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Linguist
Programmer
Writer
LA
California
TimToady
Larry Arnold Wall
Right
Something
Way
Always
Portable
Declare
Wrong

More quotes by Larry Wall

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Not that I'm against sneaking some notions into people's heads upon occasion. (Or blasting them in outright.
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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Just because you're into control doesn't mean you're in control.
Larry Wall
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Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry.
Larry Wall
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Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.
Larry Wall
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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
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And I don't like doing silly things (except on purpose).
Larry Wall
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While I have historically been a late worker, you know, sometimes I even like to get up early and see what's happened in the few hours of the night and then I often take a nap in the middle of the day just to sort of make up for stretching my day out.
Larry Wall
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The camel has evolved to be relatively self-sufficient. On the other hand, the camel has not evolved to smell good. Neither has Perl.
Larry Wall
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The court finds everyone to be in contempt (including himself :-), and orders everyone sentenced to five years hard labor. (Working on Perl, of course.)
Larry Wall
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If you consistently take an antagonistic approach, however, people are going to start thinking you're from New York.
Larry Wall
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Think of prototypes as a funny markup language--the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine.
Larry Wall
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Being famous has its benefits, but fame isn't one of them.
Larry Wall
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It should be illegal to yell 'Y2K' in a crowded economy.
Larry Wall
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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
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Programmers can be lazy.
Larry Wall
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You don't have to know the whole language to use it usefully, you can do baby talk, you can do grown up talk, you can cuss in it, you can write poetry, you can be a playwright, is sort of the idea.
Larry Wall
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Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.
Larry Wall
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The problems that I really like to solve are our cultural problems.
Larry Wall