I guess not Larry Wall, but Doug Gwyn:
"UNIX was never designed to keep people from doing stupid things, because
that policy would also keep them from doing clever things." (Doug Gwyn)
There are lots of ways Maxima could be changed to not "prevent people
from doing stupid things".
We could be inspired by Lisp, and make false == [], rest([])=[] /
false, etc. (a pun which I take advantage of all the time in Lisp
programming). We could be inspired by C, and make [] / false equal 0,
and have ar[234234] (where ar is a declared array) inspect some memory
location. We could be inspired by Perl, and have 23+"45" = 68,
true+false=0, etc.
They all allow you to do "clever things", but I don't want them in Maxima.