Information AboutLarry Wall |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT LARRY WALL | |
| 1954 births | |
| living people | |
| perl | |
| computer programmers | |
| free software programmers | |
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Wall is the author of the Rn Usenet Client and the nearly universally used Patch . 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 came in 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 informed some of the terminology of Perl, such as the name itself, a biblical reference to the "Pearl of great price" ( Perl Conference and a discussion of Pilgrim's Progress at the YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) in June, 2000 . While in grad school, Wall and his wife were studying linguistics with the intention of afterwards finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and create a writing system for it. With this new writing system they wanted to translate various texts into the language, among them the Bible. Due to health reasons these plans were cancelled, and they remained in the US, where he instead joined the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, when he finished grad school. Wall continues to oversee further development of Perl and serves as the Benevolent Dictator For Life of the Perl project. His role in Perl is best conveyed by the so-called ''2 Rules'', taken from the official Perl documentation: :# ''Larry is always by definition right about how Perl should behave. This means he has final veto power on the core functionality.'' :# ''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. SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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