Larry Wall Quotes

We don't have time for tone. We have to go out and get the job done.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.

There's no time to waste. Every day, there needs to be movement on something.

The ultimate inspiration is the deadline.

I'm more focused and have a greater sense of challenge, because I constantly feel the weight of time.

There is nothing more requisite in business than despatch.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

There's time enough, but none to spare.

Whenever I have to do something, I try to minimise the time it takes me to do it. I just cannot wait.

I've learned over decades of building that a deadline is a potent tool for problem-solving.

I don't want it good. I want it Tuesday.

Yet, I am convinced that there is a need for high quality software, and the time will come when it will be recognized that it is worth investing effort in its development and in using a careful, structured approach based on safe, structured languages.

Roosevelt seemed to feel that everything ought to be done before sundown.

Delay is not our friend. Delay is our enemy.

The best thing for my creative process is a deadline.

A fire lit under my ass? Yeah, that's true. No time to waste.

If we didn't have deadlines, we'd stagnate.

Nobody should be allowed more than fifty years to get their act together.

Momentum is a fragile force. Its worst enemy: procrastination. Its best friend: a deadline (think Election Day). Implication no. 1 (and there is no no. 2): Get to work! NOW!

If there be only hours, at least learn what there is time to learn.

When you develop software, the people who write the software, the developers are the key group but the testers also play an absolutely critical role. They're the ones who ah, write thousands and thousands of examples and make sure that it's going to work on all the different computers and printers and the different amounts of memory or networks that the software'11 be used in. That's a very hard job.

Nobody works better under pressure. They just work faster.

Fields can lie fallow but we can't; we have less time.

I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.

There are more useful systems developed in languages deemed awful than in languages praised for being beautiful - many more.