Larry Wall

The Perl philosophy is that easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible.

In the long run, every program becomes random bit noise.

I like the idea of a language that is forgiving.

Programming is about solving problems, not about syntax.

The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.

Perl is the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages.

We are all here on Earth to help others; what on Earth the others are here for, I don't know.

The key to successful programming is to be lazy.

Impatience is a virtue in programming.

Hubris is what makes programmers great.

Natural languages are full of ambiguity, yet people have no trouble understanding each other.

I designed Perl to be a very natural language.

Computers are good at following instructions, but not at understanding intent.

In God we trust, all others must bring data.

Perl comes with a manual. Actually, it comes with several manuals.

The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed.

Writing code is like writing poetry.

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.