Larry Wall
272 quotes
Biography
"Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something."
"And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is."
"Because . doesn't match \n. [\0-\377] is the most efficient way to match everything currently. Maybe \e should match everything. And \E would of course match nothing."
"Besides, REAL computers have a rename() system call."
"Chip Salzenberg sent me a complete patch to add System V IPC (msg, sem and shm calls), so I added them. If that bothers you, you can always undefine them in config.sh."
"I don't know if it's what you want, but it's what you get."
"I dunno, I dream in Perl sometimes..."
"(To someone at New York University) If you consistently take an antagonistic approach, however, people are going to start thinking you're from New York."
"If you want to program in C, program in C. It's a nice language. I use it occasionally..."
"I know it's weird, but it does make it easier to write poetry in perl."
"I'm sure that that could be indented more readably, but I'm scared of the awk parser."
"It is, of course, written in Perl. Translation to C is left as an exercise for the reader."
"It's documented in The Book, somewhere..."
"It won't be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all..."
"Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality..."
"Let us be charitable, and call it a misleading feature"
"Perl programming is an *empirical* science!"
"Randal said it would be tough to do in sed. He didn't say he didn't understand sed. Randal understands sed quite well. Which is why he uses Perl."
"The only disadvantage I see is that it would force everyone to get Perl. Horrors."
"There are probably better ways to do that, but it would make the parser more complex. I do, occasionally, struggle feebly against complexity..."
"There are still some other things to do, so don't think if I didn't fix your favorite bug that your bug report is in the bit bucket. (It may be, but don't think it."
"Though I'll admit readability suffers slightly..."
"What about WRITING it first and rationalizing it afterwards?"
"You want it in one line? Does it have to fit in 80 columns?"
"All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory..."