
Larry Wall's Very Own Home Page - mhasbini
http://www.wall.org/~larry/
======
Fede_V
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
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9890504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9890504)),
but I think it's worth reposting here:

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.

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.

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.

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:
[http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/](http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/).

~~~
atonse
This sort of interaction, where multiple grownups just talk about a topic they
have fundamentally different beliefs on, and being curious and mature enough
to have a civilized discussion about it, seems just so distant and alien in
these times.

I've had conversations like these, about VERY sensitive topics, with friends
who disagreed, and none of us held a grudge (that I know of). I miss that.

I know this happened years ago, but still, thanks for sharing. It gives me
hope.

------
davidscolgan
Oh man, this brings back memories.

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.

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.

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.

One of my favorites of his writings is The Three Virtues of a programmer
([http://threevirtues.com/](http://threevirtues.com/)):

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.

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.

Hubris: The quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other
people won't want to say bad things about.

~~~
beat
I learned Perl 4 back in the mid-1990s, before the massive piles of cruft got
bolted on that turned it in to Perl 5. It was basically just glorified sed/awk
meets shell script in a single process, and it was awesome.

As a junior programmer, I had to do some maintenance work on a couple of
daemons written in C that were just launchers for other programs. A couple
thousand lines of messy, badly structured C. So I had the clever idea to just
rewrite them in Perl. Suddenly they were 50 lines, easy to read, robust, and
had really useful logging.

Perl 4 also spoke Sybase really well, which made it our reporting tool of
choice. We could grab whatever from our Sybase databases, and format nice
printed/screen reports easily in Perl.

I was really excited when Perl 5 came out, but ugh. I wound up writing about
10,000 lines of it at a dotcom, and it was so, so ugly. All the stuff that
made 50 line Perl 4 beautiful made 10,000 line Perl 5 an unreadable mess.
Worse, there were three of us writing it, so consistent coding standards were
a big challenge.

I don't use Perl anymore for anything but one-liner fancy greps on the command
line. If I have to write an actual script, it'll either be plain sh/ksh/bash,
or Python or Ruby if it needs structure. I'm not going to waste my brain
trying to write readable code in Perl anymore.

~~~
masukomi
> I was really excited when Perl 5 came out, but ugh. I wound up writing about
> 10,000 lines of it at a dotcom, and it was so, so ugly. All the stuff that
> made 50 line Perl 4 beautiful made 10,000 line Perl 5 an unreadable mess.

I find that Perl gets a bad rap for being "unreadable". In my experience the
readability of Perl is the direct result of the discipline of the person
writing it. It's not hard to write readable, maintainable Perl 5, but it's
_easy_ to write _crap_ Perl 5. So, you have to be disciplined in how you
create things.

~~~
beat
Just about any programming language _can_ be made readable, with sufficient
discipline. But it shouldn't require "discipline" to have basically readable
code.

Python is like the opposite of Perl in that respect. It's inherently readable,
and you have to go out of your way to make it difficult to grok what the code
is doing. (Ruby is somewhere in the middle, but Ruby is more eloquent than
Python, so I'll take a little clarity risk for the potential of even greater
clarity.)

There's a joke running around Twitter about how it's hard to tell the
difference between Perl and a cat stepping on your keyboard. You'll never see
that for Python or Ruby.

~~~
daotoad
That Python is fundamentally more readable is a myth. Unless by "readable" you
mean that any Python program is superficially more visually similar to other
Python programs than are programs in other languages. Syntactic white space
will do that.

In comparing Python, Ruby and Perl, each relies to a certain extent on symbols
in the code to express meaning. Python uses symbols very sparingly, and those
it does use are either very much like other languages or established patterns
from mathematics, even going so far as to ban braces for indicating structure
--nothing is exotic. Perl is the opposite extreme, with to sigils encode
variable context (which is a concept foreign to other language) and complex
regular expression and quoting schemes built into to language. Ruby sits very
much in the middle between these languages.

The use of all non-word symbols to densely encode meaning helps reduce code
size at the cost of apparent readability. That's why you think Ruby is "more
eloquent". Perl can be even more expressive than Ruby, but it's compactness
can intimidate people, leading to defensive "humor".

Real readability comes from good structure and explicit code, whatever the
language. It is especially important for developers using dynamic languages to
document the contents of their data-structures.

If Python tends to be readable, it comes from a culture that values
readability and focuses heavily on choosing a single, consistent style. Not
from any inherent technical factor.

This is a nice piece on code readability in real life terms:
[http://www.pgbovine.net/python-
unreadable.htm](http://www.pgbovine.net/python-unreadable.htm) (TLDR: code may
be readable in over small sections, but what really matters is whether you can
understand the whole program. If you get lazy, you will make a mess. Be
explicit.)

~~~
beat
You can quote all the "facts" you want, but I've done a lot of both Python and
Perl, and it's a _lot_ easier to walk cold into a bunch of Python code, even
badly written Python. What you call "superficially more visually similar", I
call consistency. If I have to use conscious thought to figure out the
structure of the code, it's taking from the conscious thought I need to
understand its function.

And yes, Perl is even more powerful than Ruby when it comes to making code
compact, but compactness and eloquence are two different things.

------
vipulved
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.

------
InTheArena
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.

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.

~~~
occams_chainsaw
_then the expression is occasionally replaced by a murderous look of rage when
you have to maintain a 5k line script_

Try dozens of 5k line Perl scripts

I think my expression will soon be permanently fixed into a look of murderous
rage

------
kamaal
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.

I still think nothing comes to beat Perl when it comes to regex, and unix
level scripting work.

I eventually moved on to other backend languages/stacks. But I still miss the
productivity boost Perl is.

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.

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.

~~~
rgrau
I can't upvote this enough. Thanks for putting my thoughts into words.

------
jason_slack
Just in case you don't quite know who Larry Wall is:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall)

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.

~~~
collyw
It's a shame Perl isn't still used. Maybe not by those who have to maintain
poorly written Perl admittedly.

(Edit: disappointed to see the Perl link doesn't actually work).

~~~
stevekemp
It's not sexy enough to be talked about, but it is still there.

50% of my (new) projects remain in Perl. The other 50% in a mixture of C, Go,
and C++.

------
vram22
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]).

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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damian_Conway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damian_Conway)

[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 :)

~~~
btilly
Rule of thumb.

If you have a chance to see Damian Conway talk, do. I don't care if you aren't
interested in the topic. I don't care if you think you'll be lost in 5
minutes. Just go.

You won't regret it. I promise.

~~~
vram22
Great rule.

------
themodelplumber
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.

------
x0
I learned perl almost solely because I love Larry Wall's personality.

------
tempodox
Wow, that background color peels off my retina.

~~~
themodelplumber
Recurring corneal erosions sufferer checking in. Yeah, this color scheme is
not one I'd be spending reading time on during a bad eye day :-)

~~~
tecleandor
FTA : "I'm also keeping a diary all about my cornea transplant."

~~~
themodelplumber
Wow. Is that linked? I'll check it out. Eye conditions are weird that way,
maybe the color really helps him out. I need relatively dark and low-contrast
when part of my cornea has just been peeled off :-)

~~~
kzisme
Yup!
[http://www.wall.org/~larry/cornea.html](http://www.wall.org/~larry/cornea.html)

It's actually a really cool read - I wish he had more stuff posted on his blog
to read :(

------
corobo
Oh man I haven't seen geekcode in years

~~~
mjlee
Even when it was popular, there certainly weren't many people who couldnt
legitimately claim P+++++

~~~
moviuro
According to the Code of the Geeks, P+++++ means: _I am Larry Wall, Tom
Christiansen, or Randal Schwartz_.

So yeah, not many people may claim that.

~~~
dice
Full decode of the P section is even more amusing:

GEEK PERL CODE [P+++++(--)$]

My tendencies on this issue range from: "I am Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, or
Randal Schwartz.", to: "Perl users are sick, twisted programmers who are just
showing off." Getting paid for it!

------
melling
Larry’s Perl page is a bit telling:

[http://www.wall.org/~larry/perl.html](http://www.wall.org/~larry/perl.html)

Perl 6 is still the future of Perl?

[https://www.perl6.org](https://www.perl6.org)

~~~
3rdAccount
Perl5 definitely isn't the future IMO, but many will point out that neither is
Perl6.

Perl5's CPAN is still very useful, the language is still available on most
UNIX systems, it has some really nice OO modules like Moose, and the community
still has lots of conferences and releases regular updates. I personally
prefer Python in this space though.

Perl6 on the other hand is gorgeous. You can write beautiful OO, FP,
imperative...whatever code. Grammars and MOP are great. The parallel support
is cool and the Unicode support is top notch. You can also do really cool
stuff not normally seen in scripting languages like restrict the type going
into a function to be a non-negative integer in the range of 1..10 kind of
like in Ada. The downside is that the language is still immature and adoption
is slow. The VM is getting better, but with things like Nim, Julia,
Crystal(fast languages), Perl6 is a tougher sell.

~~~
okket
I will never understand why it was not possible to leave Perl5 as Perl and
call Perl6 something else, maybe 'Butterfly'. They share very little except
their creator.

~~~
darrenf
One of the most active Perl 6 contributors made a repeat plea to Larry on the
topic of its name just the other day: [https://perl6.party/post/A-Request-to-
Larry-Wall-to-Create-a...](https://perl6.party/post/A-Request-to-Larry-Wall-
to-Create-a-Language-Name-Alias-for-Perl-6)

~~~
rrauenza
Larry was just discussing this with my wife (the official(?) Perl poet)
yesterday. His wife and my wife didn't like the name he proposed. I kinda
liked it.

I don't feel at liberty to disclose the name, but it might be in the recent
irc logs.

------
montenegrohugo
His "Web and CGI programming" part cracks me up.

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)

Other efforts in this vein: [https://indieweb.org/](https://indieweb.org/)

And my very own try on a webpage ( I started last week, its even worse than
Larry's, please dont judge):
[http://www.hmontenegro.com](http://www.hmontenegro.com)

~~~
linuxlizard
Doesn't have a chartreuse background so +1 :-)

(I can't believe I spelled chartreuse right on the first try..)

------
softawre
What's with the

> Getting paid for it!

On his geek code explanation?

[http://www.wall.org/~larry/ungeek.html](http://www.wall.org/~larry/ungeek.html)

~~~
corobo
It's been decoded from geekcode, the $ on the end translates to "Getting paid
for it!" in whatever was used to decode

------
anonu
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...

~~~
ryl00
Perl is still my goto language for scripts. It all depends on what you're used
to.

------
purplezooey
_I hate my telephone. Please don 't ask for my phone number._

cool. he's one of us.

~~~
hyperman1
If only he would publish his phone number there, then we could all help him
hate it together ;-)

------
nik736
> I hate my telephone. Please don't ask for my phone number.

Yup, who doesn't :)

~~~
asaph
I think we hate our telephones more than we used to and I have a theory about
why. The time lag between saying something and the other person hearing it is
very noticeable on cell phones as compared with landlines. This makes
conversations very annoying. Person A will begin speaking and then half a
second later, they'll hear Person B "interrupting". Of course Person B didn't
know he was interrupting because he hadn't yet heard Person A begin to speak.
Then they both stop talking, followed by some dead air. And then they both
yield to one another. "No, you go ahead, please". For whatever reason,
landlines seem to have lower latentency and this doesn't happen.

That and of course there are a zillion more interesting things to do on a
smart phone than talk to someone.

~~~
tadzik_
Huh, I never noticed the latency when talking on a mobile phone, but I also
don't remember the last time I used a landline, so maybe I just forgot how
much better it was.

The reason I hate the phone function of my phone is that I see calling someone
as an ultimate disrespect: "I demand your attention and I demand it now, I
don't care what you're doing, it will be up to you to call me back if you
don't pick up the phone now!" Then I hate calling other people because I don't
want to be disrespectful towards them.

Maybe it was different back when phones were a nice thing, nowadays, like
someone mentioned, they usually mean trouble, annoyance or more work. Ugh.

~~~
thekingofh
Maybe they just want to talk to you

------
mlrtime
This page loads so fast , why can't all pages be like this? :)

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
The static site movement seems to be the modern embodiment of this philosophy.
The tools to generate them (eg Jekyll) might be clunky compared to Notepad but
it's definitely a positive thing in this day and age of ever-bloated websites.

~~~
tomjen3
My personal site does not have any JS, but honestly at this point what I
really want is an app where I can edit the page and see the markup and then
press a button and it will generate and upload the content to my website.

I tried to finagle gitlab into it (since they offer free hosting and CI) but I
haven't gotten the last step to quite work yet. Would be awesome to be able to
work in both of line mode or through my Chromebook, and sync everything with
git.

------
johnzim
Geez I think I just found a broken link - his link under the family section
for his daughter Heidi links to
[http://summonedcreature.com](http://summonedcreature.com) which is a comic
illustrated by his daughter Geneva instead. Geneva's own link is broken.

Time to write an email to webmaster@wall.org! It's like I'm back in 1994!

~~~
rrauenza
The comic is by both. One of the names is a pseudonym.

~~~
johnzim
Oh cool!

------
kwhitefoot
Makes me less embarrassed about my own web page on neocities.

------
barbecue_sauce
> "Finger me for my public key".

Double entendre, or unix geek obliviousness?

~~~
leviathan
[https://linux.die.net/man/1/finger](https://linux.die.net/man/1/finger)

~~~
barbecue_sauce
Pretty clear from my comment I know what `finger` is.

------
linuxlizard
Much nicer than my homepage from that era.

------
singularity2001
rememberry when homepages were called wallpage?

------
jhabdas
Anyone else spot the Brainfuck in there?

------
cs02rm0
I miss sites like this being a greater proportion of the internet.

When everything else was just fields... and javascript was to be used as
little as possible.

~~~
Pigo
I've been on a rant lately about how much I miss the wild west days of the
web, 33k connections and all. I used to visit a blog (it was basically a blog,
but probably 5 years before I'd heard the word blog) written by a guy who was
chronicling the government controlling his mind with electricity. It was
endlessly fascinating, and I can't even find it now. I miss finding the
unexpected.

I don't blame javascript, I blame businesses for swallowing everything in an
attempt to make money. I think I miss it because people mostly created pages
out of passion or curiosity, and they hung out on IRC because they didn't care
if everyone could see how poignant their comments were.

~~~
krrrh
I think I remember the blog you’re talking about, and now I’m wishing I could
find it too. Everyone knew about the Time Cube guy, but the guy whose brain
was being controlled by government electricity, that took your links page to
another level.

I distinctly remember getting sucked into it and then having the realization
that a percentage of the population were paranoid schizophrenics and that they
could publish now. He helped me build some armor (and compassion) for the
social media age.

~~~
Pigo
Man, I'm really glad to have some confirmation that I'm not crazy and that
page really existed. I recall spending hours reading his reports, it always
sucked me in somehow. I think he was actually a good writer.

------
lancew
:-)

