Larry Wall

“Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.”

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

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

“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.”

“Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.”

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

“You can’t change the past. You can’t even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”