Larry Wall (born September 27, 1954) is a computer programmer and author. He created the Perl programming language.
Call me bored, but don't call me boring.
Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.
Natural languages generally are not designed by humans, they're just designed by the participants and you say something new and somebody else says, "Oh, that's a cool way to say it," and the next thing you know, everyone is saying it because it's shiny.
One operator is no big deal. That can be fixed in a jiffy.
You want it in one line? Does it have to fit in 80 columns?
Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.
If you consistently take an antagonistic approach, however, people are going to start thinking you're from New York.
It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.
[Perl] gives you the STDERR filehandle so that your program can make snide comments off to the side while it transforms (or attempts to transform) your input into your output.
Not that I'm against sneaking some notions into people's heads upon occasion. (Or blasting them in outright.
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.
Any false value is gonna be fairly boring in Perl, mathematicians notwithstanding.
Perl programming is an *empirical* 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 world has become a larger place. The universe has been expanding, and Perl's been expanding along with the universe.
What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against?
Some of modern engineering is necessary to good art. But I think of myself is a cultural artist.
Just because you're into control doesn't mean you're in control.
But you have to allow a little for the desire to evangelize when you think you have good news.
But I know what's important to me, and what isn't. And I think I know what people can get used to, and what they can even learn to like. (It just takes some people longer than others. :-)