Art & Creativity Quote by Larry Wall

A flex disguised as self-deprecation: Larry Wall’s beat-up 1977 Honda Accord is really a love letter to durability, and a quiet jab at our culture of disposable upgrades. He doesn’t describe the car’s style, speed, or status. He leads with what’s missing - the paint, the polish, the outward signal that something is “worth” noticing. Then he lands on the only metric that matters to him: it still runs. Function over gloss, utility over aesthetics, longevity over churn.

That preference tracks with Wall’s larger cultural footprint as the creator of Perl, a language famously designed around pragmatism and human convenience rather than purity. The Accord becomes an avatar for a certain engineer’s ethic: if it works, if it gets the job done, you don’t replace it just because the market wants a new story. The worn paint is almost the point - evidence of real use, honest mileage, a refusal to confuse surface degradation with failure.

Subtextually, there’s also a skepticism toward the prestige economy. Driving an ancient economy car when you could presumably afford something newer is a way of opting out, signaling independence from taste-making. It’s not nostalgia; it’s a critique of novelty as a default virtue.

Context matters: the late-’70s Honda is shorthand for the era when Japanese engineering earned its reputation for reliability. Wall borrows that cultural memory to tell you what he values: systems that survive contact with real life, even when they’re no longer pretty.