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Original author of Perl Language.
Home Page: www.wall.org 
www.cpan.org for quotations.
and an absolutely fascinating guy. See for instance:
for a recent talk titled "Perl: the first postmodern computer language". A very interesting (and funny) talk with lots to say about programming (not directly about patterns or anything, but with a little thought the connections will become clearer).
Quote: "Perl is the Cliff Notes of Unix."
I think this is an interesting talk even if you're not a Perl user, for a variety of reasons. For instance, concerning the title: I had always been somewhat bemused by the term "postmodern", and was a little unsure what it meant in any area (compare "hypermodern" in chess), except that in literature it seemed to be associated with deconstructionism, which is associated with belief systems in the humanities that I despise (see the famous Sokal Hoax).
Reading Wall's talk above got me thinking about Modernism (in any area, including computer languages) being a reaction to all of previous history, and about Post Modernism as the inevitable wave after that. What happens when a subculture is aware of all previous styles and experiments and history, when apparently everything deeply original has been done to death already? That is western culture today, whether you're talking about architecture or, in Wall's case, computer languages.
I'm not doing justice to his talk; this is intended for people who absolutely would not have read it otherwise, to give a little flavor of it.
Larry Wall's three great programming virtues: Laziness Impatience Hubris.
However, like Steve Jobs, he obscures where the technology ends and the self-indulgent Cult Of Personality manipulation begins. For example, Perl 5 was long anticipated as a re-write, with a new parser, better Object Oriented Programming support, etc. Perlers eagerly waited to read its source. So, when he published it, each source file started with a quotation from some awestruck character in Jrr Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings. Give me a break! -- Phl Ip
You'll have to explain how "Far below them they saw the white waters pour into a foaming bowl, and then swirl darkly about a deep oval basin in the rocks, until they found their way out again through a narrow gate, and flowed away, fuming and chattering, into calmer and more level reaches." performs such manipulation. I would think, to the contrary, that a near-complete lack of other comments in the code would be damaging for one's esteem.
You can't have met Larry Wall in person. He's amazingly humble. -- Greg Bacon
For a taste of his virtues of creativity and a sense of humour, see Black Perl. -- Carlos Ns Rodrigues
www.oreilly.com (Diligence, Patience, and Humility) -- Thomas Schodt
Also see Programming Language Quotes
See original on c2.com