Frasi di Larry Wall

pagina 7

“They can always run stderr through uniq.”

“Yes, we have consensus that we need 64 bit support.”

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

“Of course, I reserve the right to make wholly stupid changes to Perl if I think they improve the language.”

“Besides, REAL computers have a rename() system call.”

“As usual, I'm overstating the case to knock a few neurons loose, but the truth is usually somewhere in the muddle, uh, middle.”

“But you have to allow a little for the desire to evangelize when you think you have good news.”

“Well, you know, Hubbard had a bunch of people sworn to commit suicide when he died. So of course he never officially died…”

“The only reason I've managed to run this open source project, is that I have learned to delegate even the delegation to other people.”

“I was about to say, 'Avoid fame like the plague,' but you know, they can cure the plague with penicillin these days.”

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

“Randal can write one-liners again. Everyone is happy, and peace spreads over the whole Earth.”

“But you could do extreme programming. In fact, I had a college buddy I did pair programming with. We took a compiler writing class together and studied all that fancy stuff from the dragon book. Then of course the professor announced we would be implementing our own language, called PL/0. After thinking about it a while, we announced that we were going to do our project in BASIC. The professor looked at us like we were insane. Nobody else in the class was using BASIC. And you know what? Nobody else in the class finished their compiler either. We not only finished but added I/O extensions, and called it PL 0.5. That's rapid prototyping.”

“tt>if (instr(buf, sys_errlist[ errno])) /* you don't see this */</tt”

“Piet van Oostrum: I find this a nice feature but it is not according to the documentation. Or is it a BUG?
Larry Wall: Let's call it an accidental feature.”

“You don't have to wait--you can have it in 5.004_54 or so.”

“Not that I'm against sneaking some notions into people's heads upon occasion. (Or blasting them in outright.)”

“> (It's sorta like sed, but not. It's sorta like awk, but not. etc.)Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.”

“Oh, get ahold of yourself. Nobody's proposing that we parse English.”

“How do you type it? With your keyboard.”

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

“If you want to program in C, program in C. It's a nice language. I use it occasionally…”

“It's, uh, pseudo code. Yeah, that's the ticket…[…]And 'unicode' is pseudo code for $encoding.”

“Anyway, my money is still on use strict vars...”

“tt>#else /*! STDSTDIO */ /* The big, slow, and stupid way */</tt”

“I note that the Python folks still think they like JPython. I wonder how long that will last?”

“Magically turning people's old scalar contexts into list contexts is a recipe for several kinds of disaster.”

“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.”

“Perl did not get where it is by ignoring psychological factors.”