Sunday, January 11, 2009

Quotes From Larry Wall: Unix And Linux Perl Humor

Guten Sunday (That's my best Germerican ;)

Hope everyone's having a fantastic day or, even better, are still asleep and won't be reading this for a while (???) ;)

Who, me? Oh yeah, I'm basically half asleep myself :) On the good news front, we're about halfway done manually making sure everything from this location shows up correctly at our soon-to-be-new location on the web and things are going about as well as can be expected. On the bad news front, my sleep schedule has inadvertantly turned me into a creature of the night and my digestive system is beginning to exact its slow and merciless revenge ;)

On that note, I hope you enjoy these (supposedly accurate) quotes from Larry Wall that I found at brainyQuote.com. You can check out the page, in its original context, at their Larry Wall page.

Laugh and enjoy while I lapse back into sleep :)

Cheers,



Larry Wall Quotes




Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.



Larry Wall




For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.



Larry Wall





Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.



Larry Wall





I am not a sort of person who wants to run a company.



Larry Wall





I still drive my 1977 Honda Accord. The paint is almost all worn off. It's still running.



Larry Wall





I take time to watch anime. I don't know whether I'm allowed to, but I do it anyway.



Larry Wall





I talked about becoming stupid, but I've always been stupid. Fortunately I've been just smart enough to realize that I'm stupid.



Larry Wall





I think computer science, by and large, is still stuck in the Modern age.



Larry Wall





I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.



Larry Wall





I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.



Larry Wall





I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it.



Larry Wall





I want people to use Perl. I want to be a positive ingredient of the world and make my American history. So, whatever it takes to give away my software and get it used, that's great.



Larry Wall





I'm just paid to do whatever I want to do. Some of the time it's development, and some of the time it's just goofing off.



Larry Wall





I'm never satisfied because I've been always interested in too many things and I always want to do everything at once.



Larry Wall





If any ideology is so serious that you can't have fun while you're doing it, it's probably too serious.



Larry Wall





If you're a large corporation, you can afford to pay the money to register patents, but if you're an individual like me, you can't.



Larry Wall





Many days I don't write any code at all, and some days I spend all day writing code.



Larry Wall





One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.



Larry Wall





Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned the language, it's more expressive.



Larry Wall





Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.



Larry Wall





Programmers can be lazy.



Larry Wall





Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.



Larry Wall





Some of modern engineering is necessary to good art. But I think of myself is a cultural artist.



Larry Wall





Somebody out there is going to do something that's far more surprising than anything that I would do. I was surprised by the whole web thing in the first place.



Larry Wall





The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.



Larry Wall





The problems that I really like to solve are our cultural problems.



Larry Wall





The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.



Larry Wall





The world has become a larger place. The universe has been expanding, and Perl's been expanding along with the universe.



Larry Wall





There is no schedule. We are all volunteers, so we get it done when we get it done. Perl 5 still works fine, and we plan to take the right amount of time on Perl 6.



Larry Wall





To be a good artist, you have to serve the work of art and allow it to be what it is supposed to be.



Larry Wall





We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise.



Larry Wall





We are so Post-Modern that we don't realize how Post-Modern we are anymore.



Larry Wall





When I announced the development of Perl 6, I said it was going to be a community design. I designed Perl, myself. It's limited by my own brain power. So I wanted Perl 6 to be a community design.



Larry Wall





Younger hackers are hard to classify. They're probably just as diverse as the old hackers are. We're all over the map.



Larry Wall




, Mike




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