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Larry Wall-isms

Larry sent the following list to me (and then I added some of his to the end):

-- Start Forwarded Message
A pithy saying is worth its weight in gold.

Don't wear roller skates to a tug-of-war.

Don't let it get to you.  Shout happens.

A journey of a thousand miles continues with the second step.

It's okay to be wrong temporarily.

Even egotists are allowed to have opinions.

You're flame-proof in the same sense that certain plastics are fluorine-proof.

I have many friends who question authority.  For some reason most of 'em
limit themselves to rhetorical questions.

Many folks want nothing more than to live and let learn.

Sometimes I wish I could put an expiration date on my quotes.

I've decided I don't want to be a manager.  Every time you try to be
responsive to your employees, they say you're being reactive and not
proactive.  And when you try to be proactive, they accuse you of
being capricious and arbitrary.  So I don't wanna be a manager...  

I'm sorry, but you just made me lose my sense of humor, which is deeply
regrettable.

Just because you're into control doesn't mean you're in control.

If you only have a nail, you tend to see every hammer as a problem.

You can only measure the size of your head from the inside.

It's easier to make up sayings people like to hear than sayings they
like to heed.

A good messenger expects to get shot.

The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact
that nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol.

That which does not kill me makes me stranger.

It's ironic that you would use a language as large as English to express
so small a thought.

Hey, I like C too, and have written uglier programs than that.

You need to go and find someone to teach you the rudiments of irrational
discourse.

I can only bend the rules so much before it starts looking like I'm breaking
the rules.

Just because something is obviously happening doesn't mean something obvious
is happening.

If ease of use is the highest goal, we should all be driving golf carts.

All things are proceeding rapidly to their contusion.

New versions happen.

If it makes goo on the windshield, we'll call it a bug.

Just because my fingers are in my ears doesn't mean I'm ignoring you.

Oh, I'm totally outrageous--I just never seem to inspire any outrage.  :-)

Historically speaking, the presence of wheels in Unix has never precluded
their reinvention.

Some people think abstraction makes things easier, while others think it
makes things harder.  It all depends on what you think are things.

To claim any more than that is to invite a religious war, which I ain't.
Go thou and don't likewise.

I will always write it the second way, so if you're optimizing for
contrariness, it's obviously better to do it the first way.

The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your resume by
a word and a comma.

Most of what I've learned over the years has come from signatures.

Yes, you can think of almost everything as a function, but this may upset
your wife.

Winter is worth its wait in cold.

Nowadays people just don't distinguish between prudence and paranoia.

"Lurking" is one metaphor that the Omniscience has allowed us to borrow.

Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.

The young think they are immortal, and are determined to prove otherwise.

That's okay.  Anyone whose opinion he cares about already knows that
he doesn't care about their opinion.

111% of crap is everything.

It's later than you don't think.

Have the appropriate amount of fun.

Any computer scientist who praises orthogonality should be sentenced to
use an Etch-a-Sketch.

For it, that's now.

The usability of a computer language is inversely proportional to the
number of theoretical axes the language designer tries to grind.

Programmers are almost as good at reading documentation as they are
at writing it.

Yes, Perl is specialized.  It's specialized for slinging around crap.
Of course, as T. Sturgeon points out, 90% of everything is crap.

Tonight I just can't face the Muzak.

If you don't like the way I drive, stay out of the kitchen.

Your friend is your enemy, and your enemy is your friend.

Perl is such a great deal because a lot of people have worked a great deal
on it.

This needs to be thunk through.

People who test their limits sometimes find their limits.

For any computer language X, we find that X has no clothes.

If something is different, it's either better or worse, and usually both.

When you think you're at the end of your rope, check again.  You may
actually be at its beginning.

You can solve any problem by adding a level of indirection--except the
problem of having too many levels of indirection.

Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from a Perl script.

My life's ambition is to be buried in the tomb of the unknown comedian.

Do you rant and rave, or do you cant and cave?  Myself, I slant and slave...

I wanted Perl to work smoothly in the way that natural languages work
smoothly, not in the way that mathematics works smoothly.

A wise man once said absolutely nothing, but apparently he only said it once.

Think global, act loco.

A dyslexic Greek thinks he has a broken right hand.

The trouble with being quoted a lot is that it makes other people think
you're quoting yourself when in fact you're merely repeating yourself.

Your world, and welcome to it.

"Welcome to *my* parlor," said the fly.  "Shall we quote the quotidian?"

The misery of getting older is that your fire no longer grows to accomodate
the number of irons you put into it.

I burn my bridges at both ends.

They who go down to the C in chips...

The light at the end of your tunnel is me coming the other way.

Ignorance is bliss only as long as you keep your mouth shut.

Being an adult isn't about being grown up--it's about realizing you
need to grow up.

It is always difficult to approach one's own crucifixion with equanimity.

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and cute sayings like
this one.

Only a scientist could persist in believing that data are a count noun.

Hopefully it's better in the ways that it's different.

Perl isn't like a hammer.  It's more like a Sears.

With that sort of allergic reaction you're better off avoiding Perl.
Ah, well.  Myself, I have to avoid wheat, eggs, seafood and tomatoes.

There's no accounting for immune systems.

Language design is 10% science and 90% psychology.

The usefulness of a language is not primarily constrained by what is
possible.  Shell scripts tend to be possible, but improbable.

The problem with the bottom line is that there's more than one of it.
Every spreadsheet has a different opinion.

I don't believe everything I read, nor half the stuff I write.

That's about as funny as muppet Norwegian.

The presence of naysayers does not imply that the yeasayers are right,
or vice versa.

I wouldn't be so uptight if you weren't so downloose.

Vigor is more useful than rigor, unless you're already dead.

Maybe we can fix reality one of these days.

There's only one speed limit for starships.

If the syntax of Perl seems arbitrary, it's because I'm the arbiter.

I'm not insane, I'm exsane.

Ignorance flows like water, but knowledge must be pushed.

The road to heaven is paved with good extensions.

He who hesitates is bossed.

Skip breakfast.  It makes it easier to believe six impossible things.

As we approach year 2000, we are discovering the anatomy of future shock.
Overstimulation leads to oversimplification, which leads to overreaction.
The quest for individual sanity leads to collective psychosis.

I admire your powers of oversimplification...

I'd say that again, but it'd probably land right on top the first one.

Hey, what am I doing in this lurch again?

If all you have is a Sears, everything starts looking like a DIY project.

How do you know you slept like a log?  Maybe you slept like a cabbage, or
a cribbage board, or a steam calliope.

Neologisms, archeologisms, orthologisms and heterologisms are all
acceptable here, as long as we understand each other.  You grok?

Icon is a cat language, and Perl is a dog language.

Q: How many Perl programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: How many ways do you want it done?

The phrase "over my dead body" appears to be more and more likely.

Some people seem to have trouble with the fact that certain things that
are obvious to them aren't at all obvious to me.

Garbage collection is misnamed.  It should be called "Make your mother
pick up after you."  This explains why CS students like it.

Whatever I do first, nothing else gets done.

Companies with too much marketeering put out crap.  Companies with too
much engineering never put out anything.  The most successful products
are about 90% crap.

If a lot of things are starting to look like nails, maybe you're a
carpenter.

The only thing we have to be paranoid about is paranoia itself.

The paranoia a government inspires is proportional to the paranoia
within the government.  And vice versa.

If you wait long enough, someone else makes the coffee.

Wake up and smell the toffee.

I've written some scripts that work in 582 different languages, all of
them named "shell".

Sometimes I think I think sideways.

To answer some questions, a Boolean value is too complicated.

I'm not smart enough to be happy about thinking that hard.

When you rewrite a compiler from scratch, you sometimes fix things you
didn't know were broken.

Those who learn from history are doomed to have it repeated to them anyway.

Genies and worms have much in common, when it comes to containers.

It would be difficult to construe this as a feature.

If you and I always agree, then one of us is redundant.

The problem with TECO is that it's hard to distinguish the loops from
the HTML tags.

Usenet was not designed to stop you from saying stupid things, because
that would also stop me from saying clever things.

Most of the slopes in the world are not slippery.  People walk them up
and down all day long, quite on purpose.

Many are chilled, but few are frozen.

Usenet is essentially Letters to the Editor without the editor.
Editors don't appreciate this, for some reason.

Fortunately, closemindedness is taught more often than it is learned.

Being famous has its benefits, but fame isn't one of them.

Some people think metaphors are the cell bars.  I think they're the
spaces between the bars.

Economists all think alike in all the wrong ways.  As do computer scientists.

The intentionality of an organization is inversely proportional to its size.

Perhaps I was overly paranoid, but the "underly" paranoid get deselected.

Reductionists prefer symmetry, and get annoyed when something fits like
a glove.

People are going to think Kibo and I are married, the way we keep
getting mentioned in the same sentence.

Sometimes martyrdom is obligatory.

Yes, but I think he's closer to the other end of the gift horse.

You can be blissfully ignorant, or you can be intentionally ignorant,
or you can confuse the two like most people.

Don't assume that I'm ever entirely serious or entirely joking.

There are two kinds of people--those who believe they understand
statistics, and those who think they understand statistics.

You can either value truth above ego, or ego above truth.

Most parents worry about who their kids will want to marry.  I worry more
about who will want to marry my kids.

Scheme is a church organ, Perl is a theatre organ.

Just because Perl is the melting pot of computer languages doesn't mean
you have to stir.

Efforts to maintain the "purity" of a language only succeed in establishing
an elite class of people who know the shibboleths.  Ordinary folks know
better, even if they don't know what "shibboleth" means.

Part of managing your own ego is knowing when to let others manage it.

Most computer languages fail by taking a good idea and driving it into
the ground.

Computers are supposed to serve man, not vice versa, the experience of
the last 40 years notwithstanding.

Ignorance of the law is durn near mandatory these days.

Perhaps someone should invent strongly-typed mathematics so that
mathematicians can no longer make mistakes.

You know you've got a real problem when the name you drop is your own.

The quality of this mercy is severely strained.

It's not impossible.  Not many things are.

Perl is not really uglier than csh--it only looks uglier.

Hey, if it gets the job done, I can keep a straight face, briefly.

Unix has a dang lot of computer science mixed in with the crap.

Your taxonomy is overtaxed.

This isn't rocket science.  Or if it is, we're getting better at rockets.

You're much more likely to be knocked down by a snowball than by an equivalent
number of snowflakes.

Psychology's no good if you can't use it on yourself.

I'm always amazed at how many people expect to be both elitist and
populist simultaneously.

To design a pretty language, study math.  To design a practical
language, study geography.

We invented the notion of culture several million years ago.  Overall,
it seems to have been a useful concept.

What I tell you three times is hype.

Learn the difference between expressing yourself and impressing others.

I view a programming language as a place to be explored, like Disneyland.

What we have here in this newsgroup is a failure in crowd control.

Reading the FAQ is like staying in line--it's something you should
learn in kindergarten.  Usenet needs a better kindergarten.

As long as Perl remains the Most Fun of All Computer Languages, I'm not
worried about the competition.

Artificial intelligence makes mistakes too, only faster.

There are many ways to make yourself unforgetable.  And you can just
forget about most of 'em.

Build a better diplodocus, and the world will beat a path to the mouse.

Evolution always rationalizes after the fact.  The fact that people do
the same is not entirely a coincidence.

I don't really care how the current C standard defines it--they can
always redefine it.  I don't imagine comp.std.c was created merely to
maintain the status quo.

I'd rather be remembered than merely not forgotten.

There is no entirely satisfactory solution to the problem of progress.

There are many ways to define "better", but there are even more ways to
define "worse".

Comparing languages is a lot like comparing wives.

People often confuse user-friendly with nonuser-friendly.

It's better that Perl be hated by those who don't know the language
than by those who do.

Please don't ask me what I think, or I'll contradict myself.

Psychology is the study of why we call our lucky shots "good", and
our bad shots "unlucky".

Indeed, Perl is the language of choice for net abuse.

This may seem a bit weird, but that's okay, because it is weird.

Pascal's a great language, if you like training wheels on a moped.

I don't care whether people actually like Perl, just so long as they *think*
they like it.  ;-)

Don't get brainwashed by your education into thinking that all the
answers have to come from teachers.

Perl 5 will be POSIX compliant, for some definition of POSIX and some
definition of compliant.

There are two ways to measure greatness.  One is by how many people
you've influenced.  The other is by how many people you've helped.

One of the oddest things about human nature is that someone who says
"I couldn't disagree more" will in fact continue to disagree more.  :-)

The human condition would be easier to take if it weren't so unconditional.

Escape from legalism is no excuse for lack of grace.

I no longer go out of my way to avoid offending imaginary people.
I get enough grief from real people.

It's a pity that nautical metaphors are out of style, since "bilgewater"
so perfectly describes some Usenet postings.

I won't stand for it and I won't take it lying down.  I guess the only thing
left is to sit it out.

A lot of people who think they have back trouble really have front trouble.

There's much to be said for that point of view, and you seem to be
saying all of it.

The problem with schools today is that they're teaching our kids
everything that will get them disqualified from juries.

By and large, I try not to do anything unless I have several reasons
to do it.  (But they don't all have to be good reasons.)

I don't know about you, but I'd much rather be contradicted when I'm
wrong than when I'm right.  My wife would contradict me, of course.

Next time you feel like relying on the legal system, just remember that half
the lawyers in this country are paid to see that justice doesn't prevail.

Writing is the process of banging your head against a block of marble
until everything that doesn't look like an elephant is what's left.

Perl was specifically designed to evolve over time.  Just because it has
evolved as far as it has doesn't mean I think it's perfect yet.

Well, the creation date does exist in Unix, but only at the moment the
file is created.  The problem is that it goes away immediately.  :-)

: It's too bad Larry Wall is dead.  Did you know that he used to search the
: entire newsfeed for his name using an Awk script?
I knew it in a former life.

: How about "living legend"?
Considering the alternative, I'll go for that.  :-)
-- End Forwarded Message
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-=TED=-    O-    JAPH    tedder@mailzone.com