Larry Wall on Books

"echo $package has manual pages available in source form.echo 'However, you don't have nroff, so they're probably useless to you."

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

"I'm sure that that could be indented more readably, but I'm scared of the awk parser."

"Not that I have anything much against redundancy. But I said that already."

"Anybody want a binary telemetry frame editor written in Perl?"

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

"It won't be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all..."

"It is, of course, written in Perl. Translation to C is left as an exercise for the reader."

"If you want your program to be readable, consider supplying the argument."

"I think that's easier to read. Pardon me. Less difficult to read."

"Though I'll admit readability suffers slightly..."

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

"But I'm not here to talk about postmodernism. I tried to do that last spring, and afterwards I was thoroughly deconstructed by the deconstructionists for attempting to deconstruct deconstructionism. At least, that's the construction I put on their construction of it. I was talking about postmodern culture, and they thought I was talking about postmodern literature. Not at all the same thing!"