Larry Wall on Knowledge
Browse 16 quotations attributed to Larry Wall, catalogued under knowledge, with dates where available.
This page displays 16 quotations attributed to Larry Wall and filed under "knowledge" in QuoteLineage. The selection is ordered by stored importance and quality scores, not citation counts. A topic label describes how an entry is catalogued; it does not establish the theme's importance in the author's work.
Attributed to Larry Wall, entry #231423: "I was about to say, 'Avoid fame like the plague,' but you know, they can cure the plague with penicillin these days."
Attributed to Larry Wall, entry #220808: "I know it's weird, but it does make it easier to write poetry in perl."
16 Quotes by Larry Wall on Knowledge
"I was about to say, 'Avoid fame like the plague,' but you know, they can cure the plague with penicillin these days."
"I know it's weird, but it does make it easier to write poetry in perl."
"Real theology is always rather shocking to people who already think they know what they think. I'm still shocked myself."
"Y'know, there are other possibilities if we assume that filenames are UTF-8...yikes...wait, put down that meat cleaver! Aieeee!!!"
"Would you trust the linguistic intuitions of someone who has been studying Latin or Greek for three days?"
"But I know what's important to me, and what isn't. And I think I know what people can get used to, and what they can even learn to like."
"Does the same as the system call of that name. If you don't know what it does, don't worry about it."
"People who understand context would be steamed to have someone else dictating how they can call it."
"Well, enough clowning around. Perl is, in intent, a cleaned up and summarized version of that wonderful semi-natural language known as'Unix'."
"Randal said it would be tough to do in sed. He didn't say he didn't understand sed. Randal understands sed quite well. Which is why he uses Perl."
"No, I'm not going to explain it. If you can't figure it out, you didn't want to know anyway..."
"I don't know if it's what you want, but it's what you get. :-) Usenet postings, 1990."
"That is a known bug in 5.00550. Either an upgrade or a downgrade will fix it."
"I don't know if it's what you want, but it's what you get."
"I simultaneously believe that languages are wonderful and awful. You have to hold both of those. Ugly things can be beautiful. And beautiful can get ugly very fast. You know, take Lisp. You know, it's the most beautiful language in the world. At least up until Haskell came along. But, you know, every program in Lisp is just ugly. I don't figure how that works."
"People understand instinctively that the best way for computer programs to communicate with each other is for each of the them to be strict in what they emit, and liberal in what they accept. The odd thing is that people themselves are not willing to be strict in how they speak, and liberal in how they listen. You'd think that would also be obvious. Instead, we're taught to express ourselves."