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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
Always
Portable
Declare
Wrong
Right
Something
Way

More quotes by Larry Wall

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So please don't think I have a 'down' on the MVS people. I'm just pulling off their arms to beat other people over the head with.
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I'm afraid my gut level reaction is basically, proceed is cute, but cute doesn't cut it in the emergency room.
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Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.
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Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality.
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It is my job in life to travel all roads, so that some may take the road less travelled, and others the road more travelled, and all have a pleasant day.
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If any ideology is so serious that you can't have fun while you're doing it, it's probably too serious.
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What about writing it first and rationalizing it afterwards?
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Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.
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As someone pointed out, you could have an attribute that says 'optimize the heck out of this routine', and your definition of heck would be a parameter to the optimizer.
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And I don't like doing silly things (except on purpose).
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Reserve your abuse for your true friends.
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We're really serious about reinventing everything that needs reinventing.
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Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is.
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What you'll need most is courage. It is not an easy path that you've set your foot upon.
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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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That being said, I think we should immediately deprecate any string concatenation that combines '19' with '99'.
Larry Wall
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Natural languages generally are not designed by humans, they're just designed by the participants and you say something new and somebody else says, Oh, that's a cool way to say it, and the next thing you know, everyone is saying it because it's shiny.
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Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable.
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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
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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