The Creator of Perl

Larry Wall

Larry Wall (born 1954), whose graduate work was in linguistics, designed Perl in 1987 for reports processing and continues to oversee the language’s development according to the motto “Larry is always right, even when he was wrong.”

He also originated the three canonical “virtues” of a good programmer:  laziness,  impatience, and hubris.

Larry is also known as the original author of the rn Usenet software, and the nearly universally used patch. He has won the IOCCC twice, and was the recipient of the first Free Software Foundations award for the Advancement of Free Software in 1998

Beyond his technical skills, Larry is known for his wit and often ironic sense of humour which he displays in the comments to his source code or on Usenet (e.g. “We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can’t agree on when it’s necessary to compromise”

Larry Wall is a trained linguist, which helped him with his book writing, as well as with the
design of Perl. He is the co-author of Programming Perl (often referred to as the Camel Book), which is the definitive resource for Perl programmers. He has also edited the Perl Cookbook.

Larry continues to oversee further development of Perl and serves as the Benevolent Dictator for Life of the Perl project.

Larry’s favourite colour is chartreuse.

I had the honour of talking with Larry during the 2008 OSDC in Sydney, where he was a key speaker.

See Larry Wall on Wikipedia.

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