Introducing Larry Wall

Larry Wall is the founder of the Perl language.
I won't write anything about his biography in this post, you can find it all here (and here for the French version). I just want to point out that Larry's academic education in linguistics shows up a lot in how the Perl language is structured.
To the left is a picture of the man, taken by Randal Schwartz, another key Perl figure.

The preface of the Programming Perl book states that "Perl is designed to make the easy jobs easy, without making the hard jobs impossible". Perl is very good at:

• handling numbers and text
• manipulating files and directories, computers and networks
• running external programs and parsing the output results.

Programming is the most rewarding thing to do when you own a computer. This is what computers are meant to do: run useful or fun programs to help or amuse you.
Perl is a great language to learn programming because you can start writing useful scripts right away with the minimum syntax knowledge.
The Perl's motto is "There Is More than One Way To Do It", also known as TIMTOWTDI (pronounce Tim-tow-dee). As we start programming, we'll be using "Baby Pearl" as Larry puts it, but that's ok. We'll pretty up the scripts as we grow in Perl.

French word of the day:
"un rubis": a ruby
Incidentally, Ruby is the solution of the question asked in the previous French word of the day section.

Next posts:

• What's that Blogroll thing that you added?
• How to get the xxx Perl distribution and set it up in your Windows environment?
• How to install Google Analytics on your Blogger blog
• Hello World program
• First version of FileInfo script