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Larry Wall (born September 27, 1954) is a programmer and author, most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987. Wall earned his bachelor's degree from Seattle Pacific University in 1976. While in graduate school, Wall and his wife were studying linguistics with the intention afterwards of finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and creating a writing system for it. They would then use this new writing system to translate various texts into the language, among them the Bible. Due to health reasons these plans were canceled, and they remained in the U.S., where Larry instead joined the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory after he finished grad school. Wall is the author of the rn Usenet client and the nearly universally used patch program. He has won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest twice and was the recipient of the first Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software in 1998. Beyond his technical skills, Wall is known for his wit and often ironic sense of humor , which he displays in the comments to his source code or on Usenet. For example: "We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise," and:
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