Quotes from Larry Wall

This does not mean that some of us should not want, in a rather dispassionate sort of way, to put a bullet through csh's head.

In general, they do what you want, unless you want consistency.

The problems that I really like to solve are our cultural problems.

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

I won't mention any names, because I don't want to get sun4's into trouble.

Information wants to be useful.

I'm never satisfied because I've been always interested in too many things and I always want to do everything at once.

I'm just paid to do whatever I want to do. Some of the time it's development, and some of the time it's just goofing off.

I am not a sort of person who wants to run a company.

"Lurking" is one metaphor that the Omniscience has allowed us to borrow.

We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your resume by a word and a comma.

The world has become a larger place. The universe has been expanding, and Perl's been expanding along with the universe.

I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.

If you want your program to be readable, consider supplying the argument.

The computer should be doing the hard work. That's what it's paid to do, after all.

To be a good artist, you have to serve the work of art and allow it to be what it is supposed to be.

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.

There's many scripting languages in the world, Perl is a little bit special because it is based more on some ideas from the way natural languages work.