Larry Wall Quotes

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

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.

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.

I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.

One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented by John McCarthy around the time Algol was invented.

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.

SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing.

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.

[Emacs] is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful.

I find languages that support just one programming paradigm constraining.

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

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.

That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.

A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.

My favorite programming languages are Lisp and C. However, since around 1992 I have worked mainly on free software activism, which means I am too busy to do much programming. Around 2008 I stopped doing programming projects.

Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.

Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.

The Wesnoth devs are good but not exceptionally so, and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++). Nevertheless our productivity, in terms of goals achieved per hour of work, is quite high.

The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.

Of course, C proved indispensible to the developers of all its alternatives. Dig down through enough implementation layers under any of the other languages surveyed here and you will find a core implemented in pure, portable C

Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but they only talk about them and cannot alter their ungainly properties. Unlike von Neumann languages, the language of ordinary algebra is suitable both for stating its laws and for transforming an equation into its solution, all within the "language."

Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.

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