Textbook of Linux

b. 1954, Los Angeles — Linguist-programmer; creator of Perl; author of patch and rn

Also known as: Wall

Larry Wall is a linguist by training who wrote Perl in 1987 to glue together the text-processing tasks that sat awkwardly between sed/awk and C. Perl dominated web scripting through the 1990s and most of the 2000s (the "duct tape of the internet"), was the default for sysadmin automation on Unix, and shipped by default on every major Linux distribution.

Before Perl, Wall wrote patch (1985) — still the program every version-control and distribution-packaging system relies on for applying textual diffs — and rn, one of the earliest Usenet newsreaders.

Wall's design sensibility is explicitly linguistic: Perl borrows idiom from English, Greek, and Hebrew, and famously offers "more than one way to do it" (TMTOWTDI). He coined the three cardinal virtues of a programmer — laziness, impatience, and hubris — in the preface to the second edition of Programming Perl. Perl 5 is still in wide use; Perl 6 was renamed to Raku in 2019 as a separate language.