It would be very nice to put some funny quotes around, too (on slides, etc.). I find Larry's quotes quite amusing, and they can be easily used to warm the atmosphere and to relax the public. I think :-)
Harnessing Google you get some qoutes and wiki quotes.
Also, here's my personal list of $Larry's quotes, it's not complete in any sense, but while it contains some that are very common, it also has some others that may not be just as well known, especially the ones grabbed out of p6l:
$ cat .signature-lwall.*
--
The semantics of alcohol don't change when you
reach drinking age. Only the pragmatics change.
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: Lingering questions about Junctions."
(slightly edited)
--
Sure, except that you're not really inheriting from a role here.
You're really inheriting from an anonymous class of the same name. :-
+)
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: Generic classes."
--
Now, we've said you can use a role as if it were a class, but
you do it by generating an anonymous class of the same name.
Er...yeah...something like that...
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: Should roles and classes be merged?"
--
Nevertheless, any resemblance between the Perl design process and
bouncing down stairs is entirely coincidental. (I hope.)
- Larry Wall in p6l
--
It's a bit like the folks who start posting on the Net and affect not
+to
capitalize anything. Eventually, most of them come back to the point w
+here
they realize occasional capitalization is useful for efficient communi
+cation.
- L. Wall, from "Larry Wall, the Guru of Perl".
--
The Perl community outweighs me by many orders of magnitude, and they'
+re
really the ones who are making Perl the be-all and end-all of scriptin
+g
languages. I just sit on the sidelines and cheer occasionally.
I'm cheering now. Rah, rah, rah! :-)
- L. Wall, from "Larry Wall, the Guru of Perl".
--
How much class could a class class class if a class class could class
+class?
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: new sigil".
Larry's First Law of Language Redesign: Everyone wants the colon.
- Larry Wall, "Synopsis 1 draft 1"
--
Whereas I hope that it *is* possible to intentionally
mess up the internals of the compiler because code
in a BEGIN has access to compiler data.
- Larry Wall in p6l,
"Subject: Re: BEGIN and lexical variables inside subroutines"
--
The compiler is not immutable; it is a means to an end.
And the end I am imagining is one that I cannot imagine.
- Larry Wall in p6l,
"Re: BEGIN and lexical variables inside subroutines"
--
Of course, the fact that you have to say "not to be confused with"
can be taken as indicating that people will in fact confuse them...
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: execution platform object? gestalt?"
--
I dunno. I'm not confused by it, and I'm easily confused. Or maybe
I'm just confused about not being confused...
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: type sigils redux, and new unary ^ operator"
--
I just said it was my conjecture. That doesn't mean I think it's righ
+t. :-)
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Subject: Re: What do use and require evaluate to
+?"
--
Nope, typeglobs are dead, dead, dead, dead, and dead, not necessariy i
+n
that order.
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: Packages, Modules and Classes".
--
Perl's always been about providing reasonable defaults, and will conti
+nue to
do so. But changing what's reasonable is tricky, and sometimes you hav
+e to
go through a period in which nothing can be considered reasonable.
- Larry Wall
--
Linux users are smarter than this, of course, but some Linux users are
+n't
quite smart enough to realize Windows is a different culture, and Perl
+, being
a postmodern language that is sensitive to context, will look differen
+t in a
different culture.
- L. Wall, from "Larry Wall, the Guru of Perl".
--
Except people don't actually read the documentation, and when they
do read it, they don't understand it, and when they do understand it,
they'll write it wrong anyway out of habit. You might as well write
your warning in Russian for all the good it'll do. :-)
- Larry Wall in p6l, 9 Jul 2004
--
However, anything which implies a change in syntax must, by definition
+,
be bound as early as possible, but no earlier.
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: User-defined infix subs/methods?"
--
For the third half of my childhood, I went to Seattle Pacific Universi
+ty,
where I started off majoring in chemistry and music, later switched to
+ premed,
and eventually (after taking several years off to work in the SPU comp
+uter
center) ended up majoring in Natural and Artificial Languages (a self-
+designed
major).
- L. Wall, from "Larry Wall, the Guru of Perl".
--
I'm afraid that, while ./ is cute and visually distinctive, I find
I'm getting tired of its idiosyncracies. You shouldn't go out and
marry someone just because they're cute and visually distinctive.
Hooray for long engagements, and occasional disengagements.
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: method calls on $self"
--
I haven't the foggiest clue if you're making sense. And that's the
scary part.
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: +$arg changed to :$arg".
--
Much like: "The Illiad was not written by Homer, but by another blind
8th-century poet of the same name."
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: Generic classes."
--
: Am I way off base? :)
Maybe, but it doesn't matter if your teammate just knocked a home run.
Unfortunately the ball is still in the air, and we don't know if it'll
clear the fence, or land in someone's mit.
- Larry Wall in p6l
--
It would be nice to do that as good as or better than Java does, excep
+t
when we want to do it worse on purpose.
- Larry Wall in p6l,
"Re: Musing on registerable event handlers for some specific events"
--
I think $Larry wants to be strict on this, at least this week.
- Larry Wall in p6l.
--
Though "guts" objects is a bit offputting. You know, I keep mistyping
"meta" as "meat" half the time, so maybe we should make that a feature
and call them "meat" objects instead. :-)
- Larry Wall in p6l
--
That's the default, and I'm not changing my mind ever again, at least
till next week.
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: method calls on $self".
--
A mandatory named parameter is now marked +:$nonoptionaloption.
- Larry Wall in p6l, "+$arg changed to :$arg".
--
In short, we know exactly what we're not doing, :-)
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: Multiple implementations of Perl 6"
--
The problem is that it's not always obvious what's obvious.
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: S04 default { } bug?".
--
It's kinda funny to watch the Parrot folks reinventing a similar schem
+e.
(Er, no pun intended. Really!)
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: state vs my"
--
* Okay, is Perl perfect now or do you continue to do further developme
+nt?
* Hmm, the two are not mutually exclusive. Look at Linux. :-)
- Larry Wall
--
: I'm about to learn myself perl6 (after using perl5 for some time).
I'm also trying to learn perl6 after using perl5 for some time. :-)
- Larry Wall in p6l, 9 Jul 2004
--
Whatever. Both Plato and Aristotle would probably have hated our
modern conceptions of what they thought. But I suspect Plato would
have liked Smalltalk or ML, while Aristotle would doubtless be
programming in something like Self, or maybe C...
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: Quick OO .isa question".
--
When I use the term "confusing", I do so in the Pooh sense.
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: Allomopherencing"
--
Or to be less precise and more accurate,
we're hoping it's the way to sweep the problem under N
carpets where N is greater than 0 most of the time.
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: Messing with the type heirarchy".
--
How long before someone writes $x.ugly('Python'), I wonder...
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: Fun with junctions (was Sets vs Junctions)"
--
My assertion that we can do better with computer languages is a
persistent belief and fond hope, but you'll note I don't actually
claim to be either rational or right. Except when it's convenient. :
+-)
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: Containers vs Objects."
--
Nope. I used to think RPN was completely unnatural. Then I started
learning Japanese, and now I not so sure am. :-)
- Larry Wall in p6l.
--
It is easier to port a shell than a shell script.
- Larry Wall
--
Marjorie: What are your future development plans for Perl?
Larry: If I could predict that, I'd be a smarter person than I am.
I'm just smart enough to know I'm no smarter than that, which is why
I designed Perl to evolve in the first place.
- L. Wall, from "Larry Wall, the Guru of Perl".
--
Anyway, human languages have little to do with sound theory. At best
you might try to develop a theory of sound, which we call linguistics.
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: Containers vs Objects."
--
If you've ever been spammed (and who hasn't?), your e-mail address was
almost certainly gleaned from the Net using a Perl script. The spam it
+self
was likely sent via a Perl script. One could say that Perl is the lang
+uage
of choice for Net abuse. And one could almost be proud of it.
- L. Wall, from "Larry Wall, the Guru of Perl".
--
Over-specialization is only as good as your ecological niche.
We're not just talking about dinosaurs here, but also snail darters an
+d
cheetahs and a bazillion beetles in Brazil--not to mention Visual Basi
+c.
- L. Wall, from "Larry Wall, the Guru of Perl".
--
And basically I don't think people want to mutate $_ with math operato
+rs
all that often--and if they do want to, they probably don't. :-)
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: $_ defaulting for mutating ops".
--
I should point out I'm rethinking the idea of whether or not whether a
+nd
not should be list operators.
- Larry Wall in p6l, "s/true/better name/"
--
Me too. If it's any comfort, just think of the design of Perl 6 as
a genetic algorithm running on a set of distributed wetware CPUs.
We'll just keep mutating our ideas till they prove themselves adaptive
+.
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: Adding linear interpolation to an array"
--
You've got to understand their market has always been the Windows spac
+e,
where you're actually doing people a favor by charging them money for
+things,
because that's the only way to keep from confusing them.
- L. Wall, from "Larry Wall, the Guru of Perl".
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