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Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose.

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
Perl
Serves
Single
Almost
Purpose
Nothing

More quotes by 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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Being famous has its benefits, but fame isn't one of them.
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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At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.
Larry Wall
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Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable.
Larry Wall
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We can debug relationships, but it's always good policy to consider the people themselves to be features. People get annoyed when you try to debug them.
Larry Wall
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In general, they do what you want, unless you want consistency.
Larry Wall
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Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.
Larry Wall
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The whole intent of Perl 5's module system was to encourage the growth of Perl culture rather than the Perl core.
Larry Wall
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Lurking is one metaphor that the Omniscience has allowed us to borrow.
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.
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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Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.
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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A journey of a thousand miles continues with the second step.
Larry Wall
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The only reason [not to use] perl is that some sysadmins don't allow software that they didn't pay for. By all means, let them send me money if it makes them feel better.
Larry Wall
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We don't have enough parallel universes to allow all uses of all junction types - in the absence of quantum computing the combinatorics are not in our favor.
Larry Wall
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Well, you know, Hubbard had a bunch of people sworn to commit suicide when he died. So of course he never officially died.
Larry Wall
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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.
Larry Wall
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It's there as a sop to former Ada programmers.
Larry Wall