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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
Wrong
Right
Something
Way
Always
Portable
Declare

More quotes by Larry Wall

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It should be illegal to yell 'Y2K' in a crowded economy.
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For the sake of argument I'll ignore all your fighting words.
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Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.
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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.
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As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be visually distinct.
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Orthogonality for orthogonality's sake is not something I'm keen on.
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Not that I'm against sneaking some notions into people's heads upon occasion. (Or blasting them in outright.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Being famous has its benefits, but fame isn't one of them.
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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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Historically speaking, the presence of wheels in Unix has never precluded their reinvention.
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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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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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I'm sorry, but you just made me lose my sense of humor, which is deeply regrettable.
Larry Wall
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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.
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I think I'm likely to be certified before Perl is.
Larry Wall
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A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.
Larry Wall