335 Quotes by Larry Wall

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.

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.

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

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

A lazy person will try to always find some way to do something; they'll always be looking for ways of doing something faster, more efficiently, and if you really want to control the world, that's a really sort of hubristic notion - excessive pride, the thing that Zeus zaps you for having.

That being said, I think we should immediately deprecate any string concatenation that combines '19' with '99'.

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

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

I'm afraid my gut level reaction is basically, proceed is cute, but cute doesn't cut it in the emergency room.