Larry Wall on Justice

"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."

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

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

"Anyway, there's plenty of room for doubt. It might seem easy enough, but computer language design is just like a stroll in the park.Jurassic Park, that is."

"I view the JVM as just another architecture that Perl ought to be ported to."

"As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language."

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

"This has been planned for some time. I guess we'll just have to find someone with an exceptionally round tuit."

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

"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..."

"That's a valid argument. I just don't think it's valid enough."

"Well, hey, let's just make everything into a closure, and then we'll have our general garbage collector, installed by 'use less memory'."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"As with all the other proposals, it's basically just a list of words. You can deal with that..."

"If you write something wrong enough, I'll be glad to make up a new witticism just for you."

"Just put in another goto, and then it'll be readable."

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

"Perhaps they will have to outlaw sending random lists of words. fee fie foe foo"

"Just don't compare it with a real language, or you'll be unhappy..."

"Just don't create a file called -rf."

"Larry's 2nd Law of Language Redesign: Larry gets the colon."

"But for some things, Perl just isn't the optimal choice."

"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."

"Just don't make the '9' format pack/unpack numbers..."

"I started out as a BASIC programmer. Some people would say that I'm permanently damaged. Some people are undoubtedly right... But I'm not going to apologize for that. All language designers have their occasional idiosyncracies. I'm just better at it than most."