8 Larry Wall Quotes on Complexity

Larry Wall quotes on complexity

20. Randal said it would be tough to do in sed. He didn't say he didn't understand sed. Randal understands sed quite well. Which is why he uses Perl. :-)

23. There are probably better ways to do that, but it would make the parser more complex. I do, occasionally, struggle feebly against complexity... :-)

61. Anyway, there's plenty of room for doubt. It might seem easy enough, but computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is.

112. A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.

231. We don't have enough parallel universes to allow all uses of all junction types--in the absence of quantum computing the combinatorics are not in our favor...

258. /* we have tried to make this normal case as abnormal as possible */

284. There are a lotta computer languages out there doing drugs.

298. I might be able to shoehorn a reference count in on top of the numeric value by disallowing multiple references on scalars with a numeric value, but it wouldn't be as clean. I do occasionally worry about that.