33 Larry Wall Quotes on Design

Larry Wall quotes on design

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

25. Though I'll admit readability suffers slightly...

28. All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory... :-)

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.

80. That could certainly be done, but I don't want to fall into the Forth trap, where every running Forth implementation is really a different language.

91. Any false value is gonna be fairly boring in Perl, mathematicians notwithstanding.

92. We didn't put in ^^ because then we'd have to keep telling people what it means, and then we'd have to keep telling them why it doesn't short circuit. :-/

101. The random quantum fluctuations of my brain are historical accidents that happen to have decided that the concepts of dynamic scoping and lexical scoping are orthogonal and should remain that way.

104. Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.

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

116. The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer.

118. If you're going to define a shortcut, then make it the base [sic] darn shortcut you can.

145. That gets us out of deciding how to spell Reg[eE]xp?|RE . . . Of course, then we have to decide what ref $re returns... :-)

147. I was trying not to mention backtracking. Which, of course, means that yours is 'righter' than mine, in a theoretical sense.

156. Well, hey, let's just make everything into a closure, and then we'll have our general garbage collector, installed by 'use less memory'.

159. Think of prototypes as a funny markup language--the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine.

160. The way these things go, there are probably 6 or 8 kludgey ways to do it, and a better way that involves rethinking something that hasn't been rethunk yet.

162. I'm afraid my gut level reaction is basically, proceed is cute, but cute doesn't cut it in the emergency room.

165. : - cut in regexps I don't think we reached consensus on that. We're still backtracking...

211. Perl did not get where it is by ignoring psychological factors.

222. Orthogonality for orthogonality's sake is not something I'm keen on.

224. Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry.

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...

237. /* now make a new head in the exact same spot */

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

270. In general, they do what you want, unless you want consistency.

281. Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.

290. There's really no way to fix this and still keep Perl pathologically eclectic.

292. Larry's 2nd Law of Language Redesign: Larry gets the colon.

295. Q. Why is this so clumsy? A. The trick is to use Perl's strengths rather than its weaknesses.

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.

307. It's the Magic that counts.

312. If ease of use was the highest goal, we'd all be driving golf carts.