Larry Wall and his wife are some of the nicest people I ever had the pleasure of meeting. I posted this story on HN before several years ago (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9890504" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9890504</a>), but I think it's worth reposting here:<p>I have a very charming Larry Wall story. He came to give a seminar to the research center where I was working, and gave a fantastic talk on Perl 6.
Late in the evening, I ran into him and his wife on the bus when getting home from work - and started talking to them. Apparently, nobody from the department had arranged to take them out for dinner, so we ended up going out for dinner together, where we had a fantastic discussion covering religion, tolerance, and lots of other topics. I am a staunch materialist and atheist, while both the Walls are serious committed Christians, but we had a really pleasant discussion on religion and the nature of evidence.<p>I ended up giving his wife a copy of Hume's Dialogue on Natural Religion, and they were kind enough to sign a copy of the Camel book for a friend who is a huge Perl fan.<p>A lot of people know Larry by reputation - but his wife Gloria is just as smart and kind. It was a bit of a strange evening, but it was a rare privilege to meet two such interesting people.<p>I cannot emphasize enough how unassuming, kind and decent the Walls are. If you are also interested in very intelligent writing about religion, their son, Aaron, has a very neat blog: <a href="http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/</a>.
Oh man, this brings back memories.<p>Larry Wall is a wonderful human who I had the privilege of meeting back in college. He came out for a summer tech conference we were hosting and was the keynote speaker. When we broke out into small groups he was in mine and we chatted a bit. He was the first internet famous person I had ever met - kind and unassuming, and also the creator of something highly successful in the Perl programming language.<p>Perl was one of the original web languages and the Swiss Army knife of scrappy programmers and sysadmins everywhere. It was a direct influence on many more recent programming languages, including Python and Ruby to name a few.<p>My friends and I discovered this very own home page back around the time I met him some 10 years ago. It was where I first learned the word "chartreuse", and I'm still not fully sure what color that refers to. You can find some of his writings under the "My Ravings" section, which are a hoot.<p>One of my favorites of his writings is The Three Virtues of a programmer (<a href="http://threevirtues.com/" rel="nofollow">http://threevirtues.com/</a>):<p>Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.<p>Impatience: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.<p>Hubris: The quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.
In 2000, I managed to put together $ for a US trip from India to attend YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) at CMU. I had been on #perl for years, and knew a lot of rhe community, but I had never spoken with Larry. I remember I was given a shared dorm room (even though I had requested a single), and as I was settling in, this guy in all black walks in, and says hi I am Larry, I am your roommate. I was like hey Larry, and went back to unpacking, and in about a minute realized it was _the_ Larry. It was awesome as Larry then took me around the conference and introduced me to many of the other legendary Perlers. A+ dude.
Heavy Perl user over the years here. Its the only language after Lisp, that will let you feel the power beneath your fingers. Back in the day I would do with Perl do over a weekend, what a Java programmer would budget 6 months to do. It was just a productivity catalyst from hell.<p>I still think nothing comes to beat Perl when it comes to regex, and unix level scripting work.<p>I eventually moved on to other backend languages/stacks. But I still miss the productivity boost Perl is.<p>Over the years, I came to realize I like Perl so much, not because what Perl is, but the underlying concepts. Eventually I realized Perl is the closest to Lisp in the C world. And I like Perl, because I liked Lisp more. Lisp offers everything Perl offers, and more. And Lisp is infamous for almost the same reasons. These days I think Perl refugees will eventually find refuge somewhere in the Common Lisp or Clojure camps. And that is really good, because Perl like languages are basically a programming philosophy.<p>Lastly, Higher Order Perl(free to download online) is one of the best programming books you will read. Its a book on the same lines as OnLisp from Paul Graham.
Larry used to do consulting engagements in Boulder, and I had the honor of meeting him several times. Larger then life person but in just how he carried himself - he was quiet and unassuming, but still got people to work well together. I was always impressed with how he worked with Tom Christiansen, given the two of them seemed as different as you could be.<p>Perl never made the javascript transition, but I think you call tell a lot about a programmer by the look in their eyes when you say perl. If the eye twinkles with delight at perl's simplicity, and then the expression is occasionally replaced by a murderous look of rage when you have to maintain a 5k line script, you can tell that the programmer is a great programmer and has a tale or two to inform more junior members of our profession.
Just in case you don't quite know who Larry Wall is: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall</a><p>I wrote code for a bank using perl. I'd say 95% of their code at the time was in perl. Website called perl, back-end processing was perl scripts. Cron jobs were all perl script that needed to run to do house-keeping.
Funny that he lists his personality type, and that it's INFP. I find this is one of the coding types most likely to get a) amusingly literary/language-focused and b) extremely detail-oriented about their code. INFPs are also known for their "do what I wanna" values so the chartreuse decision was amusing in this light. I haven't used Perl much, but I wonder how else it might echo these values. He seems like he's made it his own, at the very least.
Larry’s Perl page is a bit telling:<p><a href="http://www.wall.org/~larry/perl.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.wall.org/~larry/perl.html</a><p>Perl 6 is still the future of Perl?<p><a href="https://www.perl6.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.perl6.org</a>
His "Web and CGI programming" part cracks me up.<p>I really like this, and hope that at least some part of the web moves towards a similar federated approach (as opposed to having all personal information on other services like FB or LinkedIn etc)<p>Other efforts in this vein: <a href="https://indieweb.org/" rel="nofollow">https://indieweb.org/</a><p>And my very own try on a webpage ( I started last week, its even worse than Larry's, please dont judge): <a href="http://www.hmontenegro.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.hmontenegro.com</a>
What's with the<p>> Getting paid for it!<p>On his geek code explanation?<p><a href="http://www.wall.org/~larry/ungeek.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.wall.org/~larry/ungeek.html</a>
I was just thinking about Perl and how they dropped the ball. I'm sure Perl powers way more things than we want to admit - but its sadly not the first language that comes to mind when you want to write a quick script...
Geez I think I just found a broken link - his link under the family section for his daughter Heidi links to <a href="http://summonedcreature.com" rel="nofollow">http://summonedcreature.com</a> which is a comic illustrated by his daughter Geneva instead. Geneva's own link is broken.<p>Time to write an email to webmaster@wall.org! It's like I'm back in 1994!
I miss sites like this being a greater proportion of the internet.<p>When everything else was just fields... and javascript was to be used as little as possible.
Larry Wall's State of the Onion talks are pretty entertaining to read. As someone else said in this thread, he has the skill of linking to many other topics and making them seem related, then jumping back to the main topic he is on, and making it all sound interesting, and smooth and natural, not contrived. He also makes lots of good jokes and puns (well, at least some are good [1]).<p>And speaking of Damian Conway, who was mentioned in this thread as a possible heir-apparent, he is brilliant. I bought and read an intermediate Perl book by him. Some really good stuff in there. Forget the name of the book now, but it should be possible to find it by a web search. It might have been Object-oriented Perl.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damian_Conway" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damian_Conway</a><p>[1] That was a kind of mild good-humored jab at him, BTW, the kind of thing that he does a lot in his talks and writings :)