Larry Wall Quotes About Language
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You don't have to know the whole language to use it usefully, you can do baby talk, you can do grown up talk, you can cuss in it, you can write poetry, you can be a playwright, is sort of the idea.
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All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory.
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Natural languages generally are not designed by humans, they're just designed by the participants and you say something new and somebody else says, "Oh, that's a cool way to say it," and the next thing you know, everyone is saying it because it's shiny.
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The camel has evolved to be relatively self-sufficient. On the other hand, the camel has not evolved to smell good. Neither has Perl.
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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.
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So many computer languages try to force you into one way of thinking and Perl is very much the opposite of that approach. It's kind of like a, well, sometimes Perl has been called the Swiss army chainsaw of the internet, but it's more like a Swiss army machine shop. It really gives you a lot of tools, some of which are dangerous, but it lets you get your job done very quickly.
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Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is.
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You can prove anything by mentioning another computer language.
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At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.
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Take Lisp, you know its the most beautiful language in the world -- at least up until Haskell came along.
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The problem with using C++ ... is that there's already a strong tendency in the language to require you to know everything before you can do anything.
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As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language.
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The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your resume by a word and a comma.
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Think of prototypes as a funny markup language--the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine.
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There's many scripting languages in the world, Perl is a little bit special because it is based more on some ideas from the way natural languages work.
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Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.
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Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.
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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 that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.
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Many computer scientists have fallen into the trap of trying to define languages like George Orwell's Newspeak, in which it is impossible to think bad thoughts. What they end up doing is killing the creativity of programming.
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A Perl program is correct if it gets the job done before your boss fires you.
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Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.
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Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context.
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Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.
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But the possibility of abuse may be a good reason for leaving capabilities out of other computer languages, it's not a good reason for leaving capabilities out of Perl.
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