Quotes by Larry Wall

• The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.
• Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.
• Programmers can be lazy.
• Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.
• Some of modern engineering is necessary to good art. But I think of myself is a cultural artist.
• 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.
• Somebody out there is going to do something that's far more surprising than anything that I would do. I was surprised by the whole web thing in the first place.
• We are so Post-Modern that we don't realize how Post-Modern we are anymore.
• We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise.
• The problems that I really like to solve are our cultural problems.
• The world has become a larger place. The universe has been expanding, and Perl's been expanding along with the universe.
• There is no schedule. We are all volunteers, so we get it done when we get it done. Perl 5 still works fine, and we plan to take the right amount of time on Perl 6.
• To be a good artist, you have to serve the work of art and allow it to be what it is supposed to be.
• 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.
• I think computer science, by and large, is still stuck in the Modern age.
• The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.
• I talked about becoming stupid, but I've always been stupid. Fortunately I've been just smart enough to realize that I'm stupid.
• If you're a large corporation, you can afford to pay the money to register patents, but if you're an individual like me, you can't.
• Younger hackers are hard to classify. They're probably just as diverse as the old hackers are. We're all over the map.
• Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.
• Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.
• I am not a sort of person who wants to run a company.
• I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.
• I take time to watch anime. I don't know whether I'm allowed to, but I do it anyway.
• One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.
• I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.
• I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it.
• If any ideology is so serious that you can't have fun while you're doing it, it's probably too serious.
• Many days I don't write any code at all, and some days I spend all day writing code.
• I still drive my 1977 Honda Accord. The paint is almost all worn off. It's still running.
• I'm never satisfied because I've been always interested in too many things and I always want to do everything at once.