Larry Wall Quotes

Practice quality, and you get better at quality. But quality takes time, so by working solely on quality, you end up losing something else that's important - speed.

Done is better than perfect!

The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich may find hard to pay.

I don't understand why people in this country are so bent on doing the 'perfect', when you have something that is good and makes sense from a cost-benefit point of view.

My sister made certain choices about the life she wanted. Those choices include a steady job, a husband and children. But balance and stability come at a cost. It is harder for her to be spontaneous. It is harder to just up and leave.

We need a sense of the value of time - that is, of the best way to divide one's time into one's various activities.

Time = Life, Therefore, waste your time and waste of your life, or master your time and master your life.

The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything worth doing is worth doing well.

Because every design must satisfy competing objectives, there necessarily has to be compromise among, if not the complete exclusion of, some of those objectives, in order to meet what are considered the more important of them.

One must strike the right balance between speed and quality.

If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?

We must strike a balance between speed and thoroughness, between the need for time frames and the avoidance of mistakes which will later cost us dearly.

You can have it all, but not all at once.

Comfort? If a choice has to be made between style and comfort, style wins every time.

Quality is abundant. Time is the new scarcity.

When you program, you want to think you're writing the best possible program for the... for the task you're trying to solve.

People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve. (Bernard Mickey Wrangle, p 99)

I don't like to use the word sacrifice.

It is not that uncommon for the cost of an abstraction to outweigh the benefit it delivers. Kill one today!

Up to a point, it is better to just let the snags [bugs] be there than to spend such time in design that there are none.

Time is definitely money, so if you screw up a day or a shot, you may not get a chance to go back and get that shot and redo that day.

What you gain here, you lose on the other side.

In her (nature's) inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.

You've got to make haste while it's still light of day.

The greater the value of what we want, the greater the sacrifice we will have to make.