Save it for my unauthorized autobiography. by Larry Wall

Save it for my unauthorized autobiography.

Larry Wall

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Categorized in : Computer Autobiography

Historically speaking, the presence of wheels in Unix has never p... by Larry Wall

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

unix reinvention wheels

I procrastinate, but mostly because there's always too many things to do, and I got the stew in my mind that things do bubble up, so I'll throw things in there and let them stew around. It's sort of like greasing the squeaky wheels in my own brain.

wheels mind brain

Never put off till tomorrow what you can put off till the day after tomorrow. Like a variant of the song, Tomorrow, only it's more of the idea, the Mexican idea of mañana, you know, [singing] mañana, mañana, I love you, mañana, you're always a day away.

love-you song ideas

Well, coffee is my drug of choice, generally, with a little bit of Pepsi here and there, if I need more sugar. But yeah, if I could do intravenous coffee, I would. But I guess that's pretty standard.

drug coffee choices

While I have historically been a late worker, you know, sometimes I even like to get up early and see what's happened in the few hours of the night and then I often take a nap in the middle of the day just to sort of make up for stretching my day out.

up-early naps night

I'm not too concerned about the future of Perl after me, because I see how these people are interacting with each other and even when I'm not there, they are helping each other and solving each other's problems in a way that I could not do, even if I were there.

helping people way

I've had to learn kind of sense when the questions would be coming and be ready to handle them. There's a lot of education and reiteration that happens on these online channels and sometimes it's tempting to just say, "Well, just go and read the documentation," but you know, people appreciate being led along and taught and mentored.

appreciate would-be people

You know, I've got my hands in 30 or 40 different pots simultaneously and so I have a little bit of all of that where I work.

different littles hands

I was raised a musician and I played classic music, violin, in orchestras and music comedy theaters, I have music running around in my head all the time, and if I hear music that's too interesting, I have to pay attention to it.

musician running interesting

A lazy person will try to always find some way to do something; they'll always be looking for ways of doing something faster, more efficiently, and if you really want to control the world, that's a really sort of hubristic notion - excessive pride, the thing that Zeus zaps you for having.

lazy pride trying

Computer programming is really a lot like writing a recipe. If you've read a recipe, you know what the structure of a recipe is, it's got some things up at the top that are your ingredients, and below that, the directions for how to deal with those ingredients.

ingredients recipes writing

There's a saying in the software design industry: "Good. Fast. Ch... by Larry Wall

There's a saying in the software design industry: "Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two."

software design two

I'm a great believer in visual distinctions. by Larry Wall

I'm a great believer in visual distinctions.

visuals believer distinction

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.

special world ideas

Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context.

ambiguous computer language

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.

next language way

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.

writing baby ideas

The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience... by Larry Wall

The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.

virtues hubris three laziness