Wall, Larry

Larry Wall was born on September 27, 1954 in Los Angeles to a family of hereditary Protestant pastors and grew up in the small town of Brementon in the state of Washington. As a child, he dreamed of becoming a church minister. During the training, and the makings of the future author of Perl. For three years, as a student, Larry worked at the university computer center.

After graduation, Larry and his wife (Gloria Born) worked as Bible translators, and then both went to graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley. A young family of linguists still saw their future in the church arena.

But the moment came, and Larry’s work at the computer center was one of the reasons that, despite the linguistic education, he decided to take up computer technology as a more promising occupation. Larry Wall went to work at Unisys and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). In his spare time, the future guru was developing software for UNIX . It was at this time, in 1984, he created rn (newsreader). The Perl programming language appeared three years later, in 1987.

From 1995 to 2002, Larry Wall worked for O'Reilly & Associates , the publisher of his books. Care was associated with a Perl Foundation grant.

In 2004, Larry Wall took the post of senior researcher, and in fact the “chief programmer” at NetLabs.

Now Larry Wall continues to develop the Perl language under the patronage of O'Reilly and lives with his writing wife and four children in the town of Mountain View in California.

The purpose of the author of the Perl language has never been to get money. On the contrary, he made a significant contribution to the culture of free distribution of programs with their source codes as tools for programmers. New programming language Wall developed in order to solve the problems of programmers with whom he faced during the working day. When the first version of the language was published, Larry Wall provided open access to the source code of the program itself. Anyone can download and use Perl for free regardless of whether they need it to improve their own page or to create a multi-million Internet project. Thanks to the Perl language, Yahoo has started a project whose authors make great money on the site. Amazon and millions of other sites were created with his help.

Larry received a bachelor's degree in linguistics from Pacific University in Seattle in 1976.

In the future, his scientific work was devoted to linguistic research and translation of the Bible.

• Personal site (eng.)
• Perl, the first postmodern computer language (English)