Quotes by Larry Wall

“One of the great mind destroyers of college education is the belief that if its very complex, its very profound.”

“Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.”

“Beauty? Whats that?”

“I dont think its worth washing hogs over.”

“Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.”

“What youll need most is courage. It is not an easy path that youve set your foot upon.”

“Jake gets a pick here, and that results in a touchdown. [Nick] Binks gets the pick over here, and we score after that. I think thats the way it is in high school football, that turnover deal.”

“The heart and never-say-die attitude was key. The guys just battled and battled. Weve got a lot of guys going both ways, had some key injuries the week before, but a lot of guys stepped up and thats what its all about.”

“You cant build new ones, so you keep what you have.”

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.

I think computer science, by and large, is still stuck in the Modern age.

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think its still coming to computer science.

When I announced the development of Perl 6, I said it was going to be a community design. I designed Perl, myself. Its limited by my own brain power. So I wanted Perl 6 to be a community design.

Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

I want people to use Perl. I want to be a positive ingredient of the world and make my American history. So, whatever it takes to give away my software and get it used, thats great.

For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.