11 Larry Wall Quotes on Maintenance

Larry Wall quotes on maintenance

24. There are still some other things to do, so don't think if I didn't fix your favorite bug that your bug report is in the bit bucket. (It may be, but don't think it. :-)

132. If you remove stricture from a large Perl program currently, you're just installing delayed bugs, whereas with this feature, you're installing an instant bug that's easily fixed. Whoopee.

178. It's hard to tune heavily tuned code. :-)

188. I would estimate that the number of programs it breaks in the world will be less than 10. As long as one of those 10 isn't CGI.pm, we're probably okay.

217. One operator is no big deal. That can be fixed in a jiffy.

225. That is a known bug in 5.00550. Either an upgrade or a downgrade will fix it.

238. #define NULL 0 /* silly thing is, we don't even use this */

244. tmps_base = tmps_max; /* protect our mortal string */

257. Your csh still thinks true is false. Write to your vendor today and tell them that next year Configure ought to 'rm /bin/csh' unless they fix their blasted shell. :-)

261. if (instr(buf,sys_errlist[errno])) /* you don't see this */

311. Hmm, doubtful. The source code generally wasn't there when I needed it.