Larry Wall Quotes

People are still crazy about Python after twenty-five years, which I find hard to believe.

Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.

Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.

I didn't work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it's not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python.

After all, C++ isn't a perfect match for Java's design aims either.

Ruby inherited the Perl philosophy of having more than one way to do the same thing. I inherited that philosophy from Larry Wall, who is my hero actually. I want to make Ruby users free. I want to give them the freedom to choose.

If you're talking about Java in particular, Python is about the best fit you can get amongst all the other languages. Yet the funny thing is, from a language point of view, JavaScript has a lot in common with Python, but it is sort of a restricted subset.

My favorite language for maintainability is Python. It has simple, clean syntax, object encapsulation, good library support, and optional named parameters.

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

So we do software for watches, for phones, for TV sets, for cars. And some of these take a long time to catch on.

For heavens sake, if you haven’t gotten comfy with Agile techniques and thinking, get on it right now.

Tom [Cargil]s suggestion with a further idea: Propsers of new [C++] features should be required to donate a kidney. That would - Jim [Waldo] pointed out - make people think hard before proposing, and even people without any sense would propose at most two extensions.

I obviously think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.

At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.

Take Lisp, you know its the most beautiful language in the world -- at least up until Haskell came along.

I think a lot of great software has been written by people who are scratching a short-term itch, something which has been niggling them for ages, but in the back of their mind they’ve got a wonderful long-term plan.

I'd argue that everybody wants to do something that matters, and the fact that Linux has had a huge impact on the tech market and is used virtually everywhere is obviously very personally satisfying. I think programming is fun, and the community around the kernel is great, but a project has to be relevant too.

Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.

A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.

More good code has been written in languages denounced as "bad'' than in languages proclaimed "wonderful'' - much more.

A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.

I think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.

It used to be the program's purpose to instruct our computers; it became the computer's purpose to execute our programs.

If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It's just secret to this pop culture.

I think Unix is a great system - especially for running data centers - because it is very mature, very reliable, very scalable. But when I want to go out and populate small devices, I think Java.