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Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable.

Larry Wall

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Larry Wall
Age: 69
Born: 1954
Born: September 27
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Linguist
Programmer
Writer
LA
California
TimToady
Larry Arnold Wall
Information
Free
Doesn
Valuable
Wants

More quotes by Larry Wall

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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.
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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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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Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned the language, it's more expressive.
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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When I announced the development of Perl 6, I said it was going to be a community design. I designed Perl, myself. It's limited by my own brain power. So I wanted Perl 6 to be a community design.
Larry Wall
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There's a saying in the software design industry: Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two.
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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As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be visually distinct.
Larry Wall
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Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something.
Larry Wall
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I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?
Larry Wall
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The trouble with being quoted a lot is that it makes other people think you're quoting yourself when in fact you're merely repeating yourself.
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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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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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
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But I know what's important to me, and what isn't. And I think I know what people can get used to, and what they can even learn to like. (It just takes some people longer than others. :-)
Larry Wall
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I think I'll side with the pissheads on this one.
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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You know, I've got my hands in 30 or 40 different pots simultaneously and so I have a little bit of all of that where I work.
Larry Wall
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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.
Larry Wall