Top 15 Larry Wall Quotes

As for whether Perl 6 will replace Perl 5, yeah, probably, in about 40 years or so.

Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible.

Jesse Vincent: My dog is Web 2.0. Prove me wrong.
Larry: Does your dog have a long tail?
Damian Conway: If you enjoyed these practices, find 245 more like this in this book.
Larry: Does your dog have a long tail?

When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct?

Larry's 2nd Law of Language Redesign: Larry gets the colon.

…I also discovered Larry's First Law of Language Redesign: Everyone wants the colon.

There's really no way to fix this and still keep Perl pathologically eclectic.

The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other.

<div id="virtues">The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.</div>

...Then you start building things like the Berlin wall to keep people inside your community. In anthropological terms, that's tribalism. A tribal Perl programmer might say, "If you leave the Perl tribe to go and join the Python tribe, we will hunt you down, cook you, and eat you." Or if you join the Ruby tribe, you will explode. By and large, I am not in favor of tribalism. Except for my tribe, of course.

[Boxed] Multiple bouncing balls in a box are a metaphor for community. Notice how the escaping balls explode. This is what happens to people who move from Perl to Ruby.

The only reason I've managed to run this open source project, is that I have learned to delegate even the delegation to other people. (final words of the video).

As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language.

Is LISP a candidate for a scripting language? While you can certainly write things rapidly in it, I cannot in good conscience call LISP a scripting language. By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere mortals... And, of course, mere mortals have never really forgiven LISP for not catering to them.

But you could do extreme programming. In fact, I had a college buddy I did pair programming with. We took a compiler writing class together and studied all that fancy stuff from the dragon book. Then of course the professor announced we would be implementing our own language, called PL/0. After thinking about it a while, we announced that we were going to do our project in BASIC. The professor looked at us like we were insane. Nobody else in the class was using BASIC. And you know what? Nobody else in the class finished their compiler either. We not only finished but added I/O extensions, and called it PL 0.5. That's rapid prototyping.