About Larry Wall: Larry Wall is a computer programmer and author, most widely known as the creator of the Perl programming language.
Younger hackers are hard to classify. They're probably just as diverse as the old hackers are. We're all over the map.
When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just...
You can’t change the past. You can’t even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives.
I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it.
Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.
When I announced the development of Perl 6, I said it was going to be a community design. I designed Perl, myself. It's limited by my own brain power. So I wanted Perl 6 to be a community design.
I want people to use Perl. I want to be a positive ingredient of the world and make my American history. So, whatever it takes to give away my software and get it used, that's great.
I take time to watch anime. I don't know whether I'm allowed to, but I do it anyway.
I'm just paid to do whatever I want to do. Some of the time it's development, and some of the time it's just goofing off.
There is no schedule. We are all volunteers, so we get it done when we get it done. Perl 5 still works fine, and we plan to take the right amount of time on Perl 6.
If you're a large corporation, you can afford to pay the money to register patents, but if you're an individual like me, you can't.
One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.
For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.
Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned the language, it's more expressive.
