Larry Wall . Programmer, linguist and author, designer of the Perl programming language , as well as the developer of its first interpreter ( 1987 ).
Summary
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- 1 Biographical synthesis
- 1 Education
- 2 Professional achievements
- 3 Acknowledgments
- 2 Sources
Biographical synthesis
He was born on September 27, 1954 in Los Angeles , United States .
Education
He earned his BA from Seattle Pacific University in 1976 . He continues his studies at the University of Berkeley , where with his wife, he studied linguistics. Wall explained that at that time, his wife and he wanted to create a transcription system for an unwritten African language, health reasons changed their plan. Finally, at the end of his studies, Wall was recruited to Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Professional achievements
Wall is the author of the almost universal Patch. He is known for his wit and often sarcastic sense of humor, which he manifests in his comments in the source code or on Usenet .
He began working on Perl in 1987 as a Unisys employee and announced version 1.0 in December 1987. The language expanded rapidly in the following years. Perl 2 , released in 1988 , provided a better regular expression engine. Perl 3 , released in 1989 , added support for binary data .
Initially, Wall wanted to call his language “Pearl”, after the Parable of the Pearl of the Bible, but discovered before the official launch that there was already a programming language called PEARL (Process and Experiment Automation Realtime Language) and changed the spelling of the Name.
Wall continued his work developing Perl and served as Benevolent Dictator for Life for this project.
He is the co-author of the book Programming Perl (commonly called the Dromedary book), which is the definitive resource for Perl programmers ; he also edited the Perl Cookbook . His books are published by O’Reilly Publishing House.
Recognitions
- He has won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) twice.
- He received the Free Software Foundation award for the advancement of free software in 1998
