b. 1954, Los Angeles · Linguist-programmer; creator of Perl; author of patch and rn
Also known as: Wall
Larry Wall wrote Perl in 1987 as a glue language for text-processing tasks. Perl became the default sysadmin scripting language on Linux through the 1990s and 2000s, and still ships on every major distribution.
Earlier he wrote patch (1985), still used by every package-management and version-control system on Linux, and the rn Usenet newsreader.
Related people: Brian Kernighan
Works cited in this book:
- Programming Perl (2000) (with Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant)
Discussed in:
- Chapter 14: Shell Scripting · When to Reach for a Real Language
