Larry Wall Quotes on Software

46 quotes

  1. I don't know if it's what you want, but it's what you get. :-)

  2. Piet van Oostrum: I find this a nice feature but it is not according to the documentation. Or is it a BUG? Larry Wall: Let's call it an accidental feature. :-)

  3. It's documented in The Book, somewhere...

  4. Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality... :-)

  5. Let us be charitable, and call it a misleading feature :-)

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

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

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

  9. Hey, I had to let awk be better at *something*... :-)

  10. I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident. :-)

  11. ... an initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer.

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

  13. If I don't document something, it's usually either for a good reason, or a bad reason. In this case it's a good reason. :-)

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

  15. Tcl long ago fell into the Forth trap, and is now trying desperately to extricate itself (with some help from Sun's marketing department).

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

  17. The following two statements are usually both true: There's not enough documentation. There's too much documentation.

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

  19. Sometimes we choose the generalization. Sometimes we don't.

  20. How do Crays and Alphas handle the POSIX problem?

  21. I wasn't recommending that we make the links for them, only provide them with the tools to do so if they want to take the gamble (or the gambol).

  22. switch (ref $@) { OverflowError => warn 'Dam needs to be drained'; DomainError => warn 'King needs to be trained'; NuclearWarError => die; }

  23. 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.

  24. You don't have to wait--you can have it in 5.004_54 or so. :-)

  25. It's not really a rule--it's more like a trend.

  26. The code also assumes that it's difficult to misspell 'a' or 'b'. :-)

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

  28. 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.

  29. I suppose one could claim that an undocumented feature has no semantics. :-(

  30. Portability should be the default.

  31. Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose.

  32. Er, Tom, I hate to be the one to point this out, but your fix list is starting to resemble a feature list. You must be human or something.

  33. 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.

  34. 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. :-)

  35. I dunno. Perhaps you should be happy that I have a policy of refraining from grumbling about handicapped operating systems. :-)

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

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

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

  39. double value; /* or your money back! */ short changed; /* so triple your money back! */

  40. break; /* don't do magic till later */

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

  42. In computer science, it is said that premature optimization is the root of all evil.

  43. It is easier to port a shell than a shell script.

  44. : 1. What is the possibility of this being added in the future? In the near future, the probability is close to zero. In the distant future, I'll be dead, and posterity can do whatever they like... :-)

  45. May you do Good Magic with Perl.

  46. 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.

All Larry Wall quotes