"Somebody out there is going to do something that's far more surprising than anything that I would do. I was surprised by the whole web thing in the first place"
About this Quote
What reads like humility is actually a quiet manifesto against tech hero worship. Larry Wall, best known for creating Perl, shrugs off the inventor-as-prophet storyline and re-centers the real engine of software history: surprise, emerging from crowds, accidents, and timing rather than from any single “genius” will.
The first sentence pushes back on the myth that breakthrough innovation is a personal brand. “Somebody out there” is deliberately anonymous, a placeholder for the next weird mind in the next unexpected place. Wall isn’t being coy; he’s staking a claim about how progress behaves. It’s discontinuous, socially distributed, and often arrives from the edges of a community, not the podium. In that framing, the best a creator can do is leave tools and openings, then get out of the way.
The second sentence does the sharper work. “I was surprised by the whole web thing” is a reminder that even people near the center of the software world didn’t see the web coming as the central organizing system of modern life. That’s not ignorance; it’s an admission that the internet’s biggest shifts are frequently legible only in hindsight. Wall’s subtext is a warning to anyone who thinks they can roadmap the future with enough intelligence, funding, or confidence.
Context matters: Wall came up in an era when computing culture still flirted with orderly “plans” for progress. His point lands like a corrective. Build for change. Assume the next revolution will look, at first, like a side project.
The first sentence pushes back on the myth that breakthrough innovation is a personal brand. “Somebody out there” is deliberately anonymous, a placeholder for the next weird mind in the next unexpected place. Wall isn’t being coy; he’s staking a claim about how progress behaves. It’s discontinuous, socially distributed, and often arrives from the edges of a community, not the podium. In that framing, the best a creator can do is leave tools and openings, then get out of the way.
The second sentence does the sharper work. “I was surprised by the whole web thing” is a reminder that even people near the center of the software world didn’t see the web coming as the central organizing system of modern life. That’s not ignorance; it’s an admission that the internet’s biggest shifts are frequently legible only in hindsight. Wall’s subtext is a warning to anyone who thinks they can roadmap the future with enough intelligence, funding, or confidence.
Context matters: Wall came up in an era when computing culture still flirted with orderly “plans” for progress. His point lands like a corrective. Build for change. Assume the next revolution will look, at first, like a side project.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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