Quotes from Larry Wall

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.

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.

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.

You don't have to know the whole language to use it usefully, you can do baby talk, you can do grown up talk, you can cuss in it, you can write poetry, you can be a playwright, is sort of the idea.

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, that's great.

This job of playing God is a little too big for me. Nevertheless, someone has to do it, so I'll try my best to fake it.

But you have to allow a little for the desire to evangelize when you think you have good news.

The whole history of computers is rampant with cheerleading at best and bigotry at worst.

Many days I don't write any code at all, and some days I spend all day writing code.

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.

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.

I talked about becoming stupid, but I've always been stupid. Fortunately I've been just smart enough to realize that I'm stupid.

The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.

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.

When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.

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.

True greatness is measured by how much freedom you give to others, not by how much you can coerce others to do what you want.

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.

Perl doesn't have an infatuation with enforced privacy. It would prefer that you stayed out of its living room because you weren't invited, not because it has a shotgun

The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris

A couple of years ago, I ran into someone at a trade show who was representing the NSA (National Security Agency). He mentioned to someone else in passing that he'd written a filter program in Perl, so without telling him who I was, I asked him if I could tell people that the NSA uses Perl. His response was, Doesn't everyone? So now I don't tell people the NSA uses Perl. I merely tell people the NSA thinks everyone uses Perl. They should know, after all.

The overall intent is to make everyone sufficiently happy (or in some cases, insufficiently unhappy).

Garbage is usually construed as useless complexity.