Larry Wall

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Larry Wall

Larry Wall (born September 27, 1954) is a programmer, linguist, and author, most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987. Wall earned his bachelor's degree from Seattle Pacific University in 1976.

Wall is the author of the rn Usenet client and the nearly universally used patch program. He has won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest twice and was the recipient of the first Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software in 1998.

Beyond his technical skills, Wall is known for his wit and often ironic sense of humor, which he displays in the comments to his source code or on Usenet. For example: "We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise."

Larry Wall has linguistics qualifications, which were useful in 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 edited the Perl Cookbook. His books are published by O'Reilly.

Wall's Christian faith has influenced some of the terminology of Perl, such as the name itself, a biblical reference to the "Pearl of great price" (Matthew 13:46). [1] Similar references are the function name bless, and the organization of Perl 6 design documents with categories such as apocalypse and exegesis. Wall has also alluded to his faith when he has spoken at conferences, including a rather straightforward statement of his beliefs at the August, 1997 Perl Conference and a discussion of Pilgrim's Progress at the YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) in June, 2000.

While in graduate school, Wall and his wife were studying linguistics with the intention afterwards of finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and creating a writing system for it. They would then use this new writing system to translate various texts into the language, among them the Bible. Due to health reasons these plans were cancelled, and they remained in the U.S., where Larry instead joined the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory after he finished grad school.

Wall continues to oversee further development of Perl and serves as the Benevolent Dictator for Life of the Perl project^{[citation needed]}. His role in Perl is best conveyed by the so-called 2 Rules, taken from the official Perl documentation:

1. Larry is always by definition right about how Perl should behave. This means he has final veto power on the core functionality.
2. Larry is allowed to change his mind about any matter at a later date, regardless of whether he previously invoked Rule 1.

Got that? Larry is always right, even when he was wrong.

[edit] See also

Free software Portal

• Perl
• List of programmers
• List of computer scientists

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Larry Wall

Listen to this article · (info)

This audio file was created from an article revision dated 2006-06-27, and may not reflect subsequent edits to the article. (Audio help)

More spoken articles

   

• Larry Wall's personal home page
• Slightly Skeptical View on Larry Wall and Perl (Softpanorama Larry Wall's page)
• Authoritative list of Larry Wall quotes
• Perl, the first Postmodern Language

• State of the Onion keynotes: 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

Please note that as the State of the Onion speeches are often primarily based on visual humour; the transcripts may seem confusing or nonsensical.