Larry Wall

Larry Wall is the developer of the Perl programming language. Wall is also known as the original author of the rn Usenet software, and the nearly universally used patch. He has won the IOCCC 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 (e.g. "We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise")

Larry Wall is a linguist by trade, which helped him with his book writing. He is the co-author of Programming Perl (often called the Camel Book)(preview online), which is the definitive resource for Perl programmers. He also edited books such as the Perl Cookbook (preview online: 2nd edition 1st edition). All of the books that he edited or co-wrote are published by O'Reilly.