Science & Tech Quote by Larry Wall

Calling computer science "still stuck in the Modern age" is Larry Wall doing what he’s always done: puncturing the field’s self-image with a wry, almost pastoral disappointment. Modernity here isn’t a compliment. It’s the era of clean lines, grand systems, and the faith that if you formalize enough, you can make mess go away. Wall’s career - especially as the creator of Perl and the coiner of its famous virtues (laziness, impatience, hubris) - is basically a long argument that mess is the point. People are messy. Requirements are messy. Language is messy. The best tools don’t deny that; they metabolize it.

The intent isn’t to dunk on rigor so much as to critique a default posture: computer science as an architecture discipline obsessed with purity, proofs, and ideal users, while software engineering is closer to city maintenance. Modernism loves top-down plans; real systems accrete, patch, and sprawl. Wall is implying that the field’s prestige economy still rewards the pristine model over the lived reality of code: interfaces shaped by human error, time pressure, legacy constraints, and the unglamorous work of keeping things running.

There’s also a cultural timestamp embedded in the line. Wall came up during the rise of Unix pragmatism and open-source collaboration, where elegance often meant “works for people” rather than “satisfies the theorem.” In that context, “stuck” reads like a provocation: grow up. Move past the Modern fantasy that software can be made frictionless by ideology, and toward a post-Modern humility that treats ambiguity as a first-class input.