Art & Creativity Quote by Larry Wall

There is a programmer's tell in the way Larry Wall frames the problem: art needs engineering, but it must not be reduced to engineering. Wall, best known for creating Perl, came up in a late-20th-century culture where software was increasingly treated like pure infrastructure: optimize, standardize, ship. His line pushes back on that flattening. He grants the premise that "modern engineering" matters - tools, systems, rigor, the hard-won craft that makes complexity behave. Then he pivots: his primary identity is not builder-of-machines but shaper-of-culture.

The awkward grammar ("I think of myself is") is almost part of the message. It reads like someone speaking from the workshop floor, not the lecture hall: a maker insisting that the stakes are aesthetic and social, not merely technical. The subtext is a defense of taste. In programming, taste shows up as empathy for the reader, a feel for elegance, naming, and the small mercies that make a language hospitable. Wall is implicitly arguing that a programming language is a medium, like prose: it carries values. It nudges communities toward certain styles, certain kinds of thinking, certain kinds of inclusion or exclusion.

Calling himself a "cultural artist" also signals a refusal of the false hierarchy where art is decorative and engineering is serious. For Wall, engineering is the scaffolding that lets art reach people at scale. The punchline is that the "product" isn't just code; it's a way of working, a shared sensibility - a culture.