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About this quote

What does it mean?
Wall admits Perl is weird but helps write poetry more easily.
In plain terms
He finds Perl’s quirks useful for poetic expression.
What can you take from it?
Embrace a language’s oddities to unlock creative uses.

Where it applies

  • writing code poetry
  • creating obfuscated scripts

Putting it to work

  • exploit Perl’s regex power
  • play with syntax for artistic effect

Questions to consider

  • How can programming languages inspire art?
  • What makes a language ‘weird’ yet useful?

Another view

What easiness is subjective; not everyone will find Perl poetic.

More from Larry Wall

  1. If you want to program in C, program in C. It's a nice language. I use it occasionally... :-)

    Permalink to quote #9
  2. I'm sure that that could be indented more readably, but I'm scared of the awk parser.

    Permalink to quote #11
  3. (To someone at New York University) If you consistently take an antagonistic approach, however, people are going to start thinking you're from New York. :-)

    Permalink to quote #8

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