Larry Wall

Original author of PerlLanguage.

• Home Page: http://www.wall.org/~larry/

• http://www.cpan.org/misc/lwall-quotes.txt.gz for quotations.

and an absolutely fascinating guy. See for instance:

• http://www.perl.com/pub/a/1999/03/pm.html

for a recent talk titled "Perl: the first postmodern computer language". A very interesting (and funny) talk with lots to say about programming (not directly about patterns or anything, but with a little thought the connections will become clearer).

Quote: "Perl is the Cliff Notes of Unix."

I think this is an interesting talk even if you're not a Perl user, for a variety of reasons. For instance, concerning the title: I had always been somewhat bemused by the term "postmodern", and was a little unsure what it meant in any area (compare "hypermodern" in chess), except that in literature it seemed to be associated with deconstructionism, which is associated with belief systems in the humanities that I despise (see the famous SokalHoax).

Reading Wall's talk above got me thinking about Modernism (in any area, including computer languages) being a reaction to all of previous history, and about PostModernism as the inevitable wave after that. What happens when a subculture is aware of all previous styles and experiments and history, when apparently everything deeply original has been done to death already? That is western culture today, whether you're talking about architecture or, in Wall's case, computer languages.

I'm not doing justice to his talk; this is intended for people who absolutely would not have read it otherwise, to give a little flavor of it.

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LarryWall's three great programming virtues: LazinessImpatienceHubris.

However, like SteveJobs, he obscures where the technology ends and the self-indulgent CultOfPersonality manipulation begins. For example, Perl 5 was long anticipated as a re-write, with a new parser, better ObjectOrientedProgramming support, etc. Perlers eagerly waited to read its source. So, when he published it, each source file started with a quotation from some awestruck character in JrrTolkien's LordOfTheRings. Give me a break! -- PhlIp

You'll have to explain how "Far below them they saw the white waters pour into a foaming bowl, and then swirl darkly about a deep oval basin in the rocks, until they found their way out again through a narrow gate, and flowed away, fuming and chattering, into calmer and more level reaches." performs such manipulation. I would think, to the contrary, that a near-complete lack of other comments in the code would be damaging for one's esteem.

You can't have met LarryWall in person. He's amazingly humble. -- GregBacon

For a taste of his virtues of creativity and a sense of humour, see BlackPerl. -- CarlosNsRodrigues

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/larry.html (Diligence, Patience, and Humility) -- ThomasSchodt

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Also see ProgrammingLanguageQuotes

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CategoryPerson