86 Larry Wall Quotes on Perl

Larry Wall quotes on perl

1. Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something. :-)

2. And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is. :-)

4. Chip Salzenberg sent me a complete patch to add System V IPC (msg, sem and shm calls), so I added them. If that bothers you, you can always undefine them in config.sh. :-)

6. I dunno, I dream in Perl sometimes...

10. I know it's weird, but it does make it easier to write poetry in perl. :-)

12. It is, of course, written in Perl. Translation to C is left as an exercise for the reader. :-)

16. Dan Smith: I've tried (in vi) 'g/[a-z] [a-z]/s//_/'...but that doesn't cut it. Any ideas? (I take it that it may be a two-pass sort of solution). Larry Wall: In the first pass, install perl. :-)

19. Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

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. :-)

22. The only disadvantage I see is that it would force everyone to get Perl. Horrors. :-)

33. In general, if you think something isn't in Perl, try it out, because it usually is. :-)

35. It's there as a sop to former Ada programmers. :-)

38. last|perl -pe '$_ x=/(..:..)...(.*)/&&$1ge$1&&$1lt$2' That's gonna be tough for Randal to beat... :-)

40. Perl itself is usually pretty good about telling you what you shouldn't do. :-)

42. There are many times when you want it to ignore the rest of the string just like atof() does. Oddly enough, Perl calls atof(). How convenient. :-)

46. : And it goes against the grain of building small tools. Innocent, Your Honor. Perl users build small tools all day long.

50. If you want to see useful Perl examples, we can certainly arrange to have comp.lang.misc flooded with them, but I don't think that would help the advance of civilization. :-)

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.

52. Just don't compare it with a real language, or you'll be unhappy... :-)

64. I want to see people using Perl to glue things together creatively, not just technically but also socially.

69. : But for some things, Perl just isn't the optimal choice. (yet) :-)

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

78. I think $[ is more like a coelacanth than a mastadon.

82. The whole intent of Perl 5's module system was to encourage the growth of Perl culture rather than the Perl core.

90. True, it returns ' ' for false, but ' ' is an even more interesting number than 0.

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

93. Anybody want a binary telemetry frame editor written in Perl?

95. Perl has a long tradition of working around compilers.

100. Of course, this being Perl, we could always take both approaches. :-)

115. You tell it that it's indicative by appending $!. That's why we made $! such a short variable name, after all. :-)

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.

131. Anyway, my money is still on use strict vars . . .

134. It's certainly easy to calculate the average attendance for Perl conferences.

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.)

137. Just don't make the '9' format pack/unpack numbers... :-)

140. Well, you can implement a Perl peek() with unpack('P',...). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity. :-)

141. It may be possible to get this condition from within Perl if a signal handler runs at just the wrong moment. Another point for Chip... :-)

142. As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be visually distinct.

174. Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose.

179. Perl will always provide the null.

181. Well, I think Perl should run faster than C. :-)

182. To Perl, or not to Perl, that is the kvetching.

183. I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'. :-)

187. Perl should remain fast and intuitive (to the extent that it is :-)

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.

190. I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?

191. Y'know, there are other possibilities if we assume that filenames are UTF-8...yikes...wait, put down that meat cleaver! Aieeee!!!

192. print rand rand rand 1, ' '; # interesting distribution

193. : I could understand principles of Perl source in 2-3 days [. . .] Gee, it took me about eleven years. :-)

196. I've always maintained a cordial dislike for indent, because it's usually right.

197. I'd make people say 'use Fork;' if I thought I could get away with it.

198. The way I see it, if you declare something portable, you'll always be wrong, and if you declare it non-portable, you'll always be right. :-)

199. Perhaps you should compile your Perl with long doubles one of these megaseconds.

201. Maybe we should take a clue from FTP and put in an option like 'print hash marks on every 1024 iterations'. :-)

202. And besides, if Perl really takes off in the Windows space, I think the rest of us would just as soon have a double-agent within ActiveState. :-)

203. The court finds everyone to be in contempt (including himself :-), and orders everyone sentenced to five years hard labor. (Working on Perl, of course.)

205. I view the JVM as just another architecture that Perl ought to be ported to. (That, and the Underwood typewriter...)

206. So please don't think I have a 'down' on the MVS people. I'm just pulling off their arms to beat other people over the head with.

207. It's, uh, pseudo code. Yeah, that's the ticket... [...] And 'unicode' is pseudo code for $encoding. :-)

208. : What do people think? What, do people think? :-)

209. Well, sure, I explicitly mentioned 'vtables' last time I brought this up. But a single pointer is fairly paltry, as tables go. :-)

216. So I'm thinking about ??, or !!, or //, or \, or whatever. But I think I like ?? the best so far. Or the least worst.

243. stab_val(stab)->str_nok = 1; /* what a wonderful hack! */

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

245. pos += screamnext[pos] /* does this goof up anywhere? */

246. str->str_pok |= SP_FBM; /* deep magic */ s = (unsigned char*)(str->str_ptr); /* deeper magic */

263. #else /* !STDSTDIO */ /* The big, slow, and stupid way */

264. /* This bit of chicanery makes a unary function followed by a parenthesis into a function with one argument, highest precedence. */

272. Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.

273. Remember though that THERE IS NO GENERAL RULE FOR CONVERTING A LIST INTO A SCALAR.

274. The autodecrement is not magical.

275. *** The previous line contains the naughty word '$&'. if /(ibm|apple|awk)/; # :-)

276. When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi.

278. And C was good at something I like to call manipulexity, that is the manipulation of complex things. While shell was good at something else which I call whipuptitude, the aptitude for whipping things up.

279. So... Perhaps the Perl 6 slogan should be 'All Your Paradigms Are Belong To Us'. We'll get to that.

280. I simultaneously believe that languages are wonderful and awful. You have to hold both of those. Ugly things can be beautiful. And beautiful can get ugly very fast. You know, take Lisp. You know, it's the most beautiful language in the world. At least up until Haskell came along. (laughter) But, you know, every program in Lisp is just ugly. I don't figure how that works.

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.

286. [Boxed] Multiple bouncing balls in a box are a metaphor for community. Notice how the escaping balls explode. This is what happens to people who move from Perl to Ruby.

287. ...Then you start building things like the Berlin wall to keep people inside your community. In anthropological terms, that's tribalism. A tribal Perl programmer might say, 'If you leave the Perl tribe to go and join the Python tribe, we will hunt you down, cook you, and eat you.' Or if you join the Ruby tribe, you will explode. By and large, I am not in favor of tribalism. Except for my tribe, of course.

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

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

299. Interestingly enough, since subroutine declarations can come anywhere, you wouldn't have to put BEGIN {} at the beginning, nor END {} at the end. Interesting, no? I wonder if Henry would like it. :-)

301. : I've heard that there is a shell (bourne or csh) to perl filter, does : anyone know of this or where I can get it? Yeah, you filter it through Tom Christiansen. :-)

303. > This made me wonder, suddenly: can telnet be written in perl? Of course it can be written in Perl. Now if you'd said nroff, that would be more challenging...

305. (Presuming for the sake of argument that it's even *possible* to design better code in Perl than in C. :-)

308. May you do Good Magic with Perl.