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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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Larry Wall
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: September 27
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Linguist
Programmer
Writer
LA
California
TimToady
Larry Arnold Wall
Impossible
Define
Language
George
Newspeak
Ends
Fallen
Orwell
Many
Scientist
Trap
Trying
Killing
Traps
Think
Computer
Languages
Thinking
Creativity
Programming
Like
Thoughts
Scientists

More quotes by Larry Wall

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Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.
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Let us be charitable, and call it a misleading feature.
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I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident.
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For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.
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The random quantum fluctuations of my brain are historical accidents that happen to have decided that the concepts of dynamic scoping and lexical scoping are orthogonal and should remain that way.
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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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My arthritic pinkies are already starting to ache just thinking about ||||=.
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Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable.
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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.
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Though I'll admit readability suffers slightly.
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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.
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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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One operator is no big deal. That can be fixed in a jiffy.
Larry Wall
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If you write something wrong enough, I'll be glad to make up a new witticism just for you.
Larry Wall
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Many days I don't write any code at all, and some days I spend all day writing code.
Larry Wall
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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
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Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is.
Larry Wall
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It won't be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all.
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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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