16 Larry Wall Quotes on Language design

Larry Wall quotes on language design

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

29. Besides, including <std_ice_cubes.h> is a fatal error on machines that don't have it yet. Bad language design, there... :-)

32. If I allowed 'next $label' then I'd also have to allow 'goto $label', and I don't think you really want that... :-)

51. > (It's sorta like sed, but not. It's sorta like awk, but not. etc.) Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.

72. So far we've managed to avoid turning Perl into APL. :-)

76. Of course, I reserve the right to make wholly stupid changes to Perl if I think they improve the language. :-)

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.

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.

122. But the possibility of abuse may be a good reason for leaving capabilities out of other computer languages, it's not a good reason for leaving capabilities out of Perl.

136. Historically Tcl has always stored all intermediate results as strings. (With 8.0 they're rethinking that. Of course, Perl rethought that from the start.)

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

283. If there's a particular problem that Perl is trying to solve, it's the basic fact that all programming languages suck. Sort of the concept of original sin, applied to programming languages.

291. :I also discovered Larry's First Law of Language Redesign: Everyone wants the colon.

313. Many computer scientists have fallen into the trap of trying to define languages like George Orwell's Newspeak, in which it is impossible to think bad thoughts. What they end up doing is killing the creativity of programming.