We need more quotes, from Larry, about Perl, about programming, about hacking, etc. Once a day the quote rotates in the footer of the site. Take a look at our quotes file and post your favorite quotes here, or if there are a lot of them, just post a link to them or something. Thanks.
Old stuff....
Abigail on 2000-04-14T16:45:47
Just like any other list of "Wall quotes", this mainly consists of quotes of the early '90s. Any list of JAPHs I've seen also consists of things from the early '90s.
Hasn't anyone said something about Perl worth remembering in the past 5 years? Or should we present the imagine Perl is dead and it's time it's been replaced? ;-)
-- Abigail
Not explicitly Perl but....
MeerCat on 2000-04-14T17:05:37
Here's 20 of my Software - related quotes...
Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
... implementations should follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.
Jon Postel, RFC 761
The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.
---Donald E. Knuth
More good code has been written in languages denounced as ``bad'' than in languages proclaimed ``wonderful'' -- much more.
---Bjarne Stroustrup, "The Design and Evolution of C++" (1994)
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
---Paul Anderson
There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
---C.A.R. Hoare
... with proper design, the features come cheaply. This approach is arduous, but continues to succeed.
---Dennis Ritchie
Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
---Alan Kay
Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming.
---C.A.R. Hoare
The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases. The terrible temptation to tweak should be resisted unless the payoff is really noticeable.
---Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.
---Geoffrey Chaucer
There are features that should not be used.
There are concepts that should not be exploited.
There are problems that should not be solved.
There are programs that should not be written.
---Richard Harter, <rh@smds.com>
Writing code
... is
not an exercise in manliness.
---Mark Hahn, <hahn@neurocog.lrdc.pitt.edu>
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
---Bertrand Russell
Luck is the residue of design.
---Branch Rickey
It's hard to read through a book on the principles of magic without glancing at the cover periodically to make sure it isn't a book on software design.
---Bruce Tognazzini
Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
---Abelson and Sussman
A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do.
---Dennis Ritchie
Re:Old stuff....
pudge on 2000-04-14T18:09:13
Greg Bacon had some up-to-date Larry quotes. I have a few of my own I am going to put in (including his recent "I like my Sarathy. I'll let you play with him if you're nice.").
one from Mark-Jason Dominus
brevity on 2000-04-15T23:47:06
Job security begins with C. It has no memory management model except what grows in the programmer's head. This programmer cannot be fired.
-- Mark-Jason Dominus, on EFNet #perl, 19 July 1999
I liked this so much I started a #perl quotes file, but this is as yet the only entry.
Larry Quotes
chip on 2000-04-16T05:48:51
-
I create nice things...because it pleases the Author of my story.
-
Here is Perl. It's yours. It's everybody's. It's part of Unix.
Use it as appropriate.
-
Why would anyone want to write a Scheme intepreter in Perl?
-- Felix Lee
Madness.
-- Larry Wall
-
You want heresy, I'll give you heresy. :-)
How 'bout this:
- Decomposition does you no good if you can't compose.
- Shell syntax is similar to (and almost as useless as) transformational grammar.
- A language that overly encourages coining suffers rapid dialectical divergence.
- There's too much good code around.
- If someone claims to be avoiding complexity, check under his rug.
- Using a simple language on a complex problem doesn't result in a simple
solution.
- Languages don't differ in what you can say--they differ in what you must say.
- People don't mind context-dependency very much.
- Lean and mean code can bully you.
- A religion based solely on either hedonism or stoicism is wrong.
- Programming should be a fun discipline.
- Sometimes you want everything to look like a nail.
- There's More Than One Way To Do It.
That should do for starters...
-
I'll say it again for the logic impaired.
-
Too much caution is as dangerous as too little--it just takes longer
to lose.
"Angels rush in where fools fear to tread." :-)
-
perl -e 'print "*" x 1023, "\n"' | cut -c1-70
cut: ERROR: line too long
perl -e 'print "*" x 2560, "\n"' | awk '{print substr($0,1,70)}'
awk: record `********************...' too long
perl -e 'print "*" x 1_000_000,"\n"' | perl -pe 'chop; $_=substr($_,0,70)."\n"'
**********************************************************************
-
I think you'll find that, while we all know what it should have been,
we all know it should have been something different from what
everybody else things it should have been.
-
Much as I hate to say it, the Computer Science view of language design
has gotten too inbred in recent years. The Computer Scientists should
pay more attention to the Linguists, who have a much better handle on
how people prefer to communicate.
-
Optimizations always bust things, because all optimizations are, in
the long haul, a form of cheating, and cheaters eventually get caught.
-
The other reason for the difficulties is that it's become about 4
times harder to write portable [C] code since all these new standards came
out. For each new standard, there are those that haven't implemented
it, those that have implemented part of it and indicate they've
implemented all of it, those that have implemented almost all of it
but don't indicated that they've implemented any of it, those that
have implemented more than the standard but only indicate they've
implemented the standard, and those that have implemented the standard
in a buggy fashion. There are n different ways of indicating you've
implemented part of the standard. Nobody's solved the basic problem
that the C preprocessor thinks it's a fatal error for an include file
not to exist. Nobody's solved the other basic problem that the C
preprocessor can't tell which routines and types are available to the
compiler.
-
The point of having those different constructs is not so that you can
optimize for speed. It's so that you can optimize for readability, or
writeability, or maintainability, or portability, or familiarity, or
editability by a particular editor, or, or, or...
Did you ever notice that there's more than one way to say something in
English? The following are more or less equivalent:
- If you persist in your current actions, I shall have to terminate you.
- Stop that, or I'll shoot!
- Freeze! Police!
These are each optimal for different situations.
-
Some [people] feel that the best way to improve Perl would be to go
back in time and shoot the author before he wrote it.
-
[Perl is] more like a tank than a mine field. It may be ugly, but it
shoots straight and gets you where you're going, if you don't mind a
few squashed daisies.
-
Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to
pay another nickel. But hey! You only feel 5 cents poorer each time.
-
The language Unix is vastly more inconsistent than the language Perl.
And guaranteed to remain that way, forever and ever, amen.
I freely admit Perl is not pretty. I always have. It's mentioned in
the first paragraph of the man page. But I think your long
familiarity with Unix has blinded you to its ugliness, from which
Perl's ugliness derives (at least in part).
What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people
have stopped banging their heads against?
-
s = (char*)(long)retval; /* ouch */
-
The flip-flop operator generally only evaluates one or the other of
its arguments. Turns out that in a threaded interpreter like Perl 5
you have to have three operations besides those that produce the
arguments. The first one decides whether to evaluate the first
argument or the second, depending on the context and maybe the state
of the flip-flop. The second one decides whether to just evaluate the
second argument because of list context, or perhaps to flip the
flip-flop and then maybe evaluate the second argument because the
flip-flop just flipped, and we want to see if we should flop it
immediately. The third operation either does the range in list
context, or checks to see if we should flop the flip-flop.
Of course, if the context can be determined at compile time (and it
usually can), this can be optimized somewhat.
-
I do quarrel with logic that says, "Stupid people are associated with
X, therefore X is stupid." Stupid people are associated with everything.
-
Unfortunately, some systems are so far gone that their csh doesn't
even have an eval. In such cases, immediate and radical amputation of
the power cord is the only recourse.
-
I have to do some "real work" now, so don't write anything
interesting. :-)
-
Tell you what. Let's just issue a mandatory warning at the startup of
every Perl script that says:
"Don't be stupid."
-
Perl isn't really about safety. It's about getting where you're going,
and enjoying the trip. It's more important to be a good driver than
to have seven feet of sponge rubber all around your car.
-
> Am I correct that perl5-porters is the proper forum for submitting
> my ideas?
I think you didn't get a reply because you used the terms "correct" and
"proper", neither of which has much meaning in Perl culture. :-)
Nevertheless, this is as good a forum as any. But be advised that
there is a stiff breeze, and you may occasionally have to tack into it.
-
The computer should be doing the hard work. That's what it's paid
to do, after all. The fact that it takes a little hard work from the
programmer to make the computer do hard work should not be a
consideration when the payoff is big.
-
Besides, I wasn't trying to help them understand. I was only trying
to help them think they understand.
-
It's not really a rule--it's more like a trend.
-
Lispers are among the best grads of the Sweep-It-Under-Someone-
Else's-Carpet School of Simulated Simplicity.
[Was that sufficiently incendiary? :-)]
-
The Golden Gate wasn't our fault either, but we still put a bridge
across it.
-
I'm not opposed to run-time solutions--I've used them often enough in
the past. But I'd really like to avoid creating yet another layer of
OO. There's only so much polymorphism that a language can put up with
before it turns into Python.
-
Oh, get ahold of yourself. Nobody's proposing that we parse English.
-
Perl is, in intent, a cleaned up and summarized version of that
wonderful semi-natural language known as "Unix".
-
There's often more than one correct thing.
There's often more than one right thing.
There's often more than one obvious thing.
-
Hmm. Y'know, there are other possibilities if we assume that
filenames are UTF-8...yikes...wait, put down that meat cleaver!
Aieeee!!!
-
Remember that the temperature at which frogs actually boil has been
going up over time, in accordance with Moore's law.
-
Live and let learn, that's my policy.
-
It's easier to fix a broken spec than 10,000 broken programs.
-
Stability is often more correct than correctness.
And finally, two not from Larry:
-
Free software projects without good input filtering of ideas turn into
bloated sludge. Egcs has good filtering (you should hear some of the
things people say about the Cygnus guys after they get told "no" a few
times ;)) so it works.
-- Alan Cox
-
Sometimes you have to make products just because they are cool.
-- Larry Augustin
My favorite larry quote
rusty on 2000-04-19T19:10:00
"You can never entirely stop being what you once
were. That's why it's important to be the right
person today, and not put it off till tomorrow." -Larry Wall
