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T A B L E__T A L K Chat room ethics: Share your personal list of do's and don'ts in Table Talk's Digital Culture area - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Typing for nonconformists By Alex Marshall The Dvorak alternative keyboard is a boon for the aching hand (10/12/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Free speech or blatant ripoff? Copyright suit pits newspapers against conservative site (10/09/98) The games people play By Greg Lindsay Myst and Riven are a dead end. The future of computer gaming lies in online, multiplayer worlds (10/08/98) Wired acquired By Janelle Brown Lycos gobbles up the pieces of Wired's online empire. Is the revolution over? (10/07/98) Under the Microscope By Andrew Leonard Ad-review site shines a bright light on the mysteries of Web banners (10/06/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURES ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - 21st Log Lego robots for Mac addicts - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

The joy of Perl HOW LARRY WALL INVENTED A MESSY PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE -- AND CHANGED THE FACE OF THE WEB. BY ANDREW LEONARD | Larry Wall smiles when he recalls the message that Yahoo co-founder David Filo sent him several years ago, shortly before Yahoo was to go public. Yahoo, wrote Filo, could never have been started without Perl, the all-purpose programming language Wall invented. So would Larry like to buy some cheap, pre-IPO stock? Back in early 1996, at the absolute height of Silicon Valley Internet IPO madness, such an offer was akin to asking if you would accept a dump truck delivery of solid gold ingots on your front lawn. But for Wall, money has never been a primary motivation. Though widely acclaimed as the author of one of the most valuable tools for hackers anywhere, Wall lives modestly in suburban Mountain View, Calif., tooling around town in a well-worn 1977 Honda Accord. Perl itself was never about money -- Wall created the language to solve a programming problem he faced during his day job, and from the get-go he made sure that the source code to Perl would be freely available. People are always allowed to tinker with Perl -- regardless of whether they use it to construct a multibillion-dollar Internet directory company or just to get a survey form working on their own home page. Still, Wall may be frugal, but he's not stupid. He accepted the offer and bought some Yahoo stock for his 14-year-old daughter -- enough to pay for her college education. A better example of the Internet's old "gift economy" ethic could hardly be imagined -- give unto the Net, and you shall receive. Larry Wall likes to call Perl a "humble" language. In his soft-spoken voice, he describes Perl as if it were a meek, obeisant servant, existing only to "let you bend it to your uses." The legions of Perl hackers who swarm the Web are less modest: Perl, they declare, is the indispensable duct tape, or glue, that holds the entire Web together -- not just Yahoo, but Amazon and a million other sites. Without Perl and Larry Wall, Perl's advocates argue, the Net would be but a pale shadow of its current self. Wall has played an important role in spurring forward not only the Web's evolution but also the burgeoning free software/open source movement responsible for so much of the Internet's structure and plumbing. But even though his peers hail him as one of the "paramount chiefs and wise elders" of free-software culture, Wall's version of leadership is utterly self-effacing -- a character trait that sets him apart from some of the other leaders of the movement. The son and grandson of preachers, Wall is himself a religious man. His mission, says his friend and close Perl collaborator Tom Christiansen, is to act on his belief "in people working together. He projects his inner vision of selfless work for mutual benefit onto Perl." But he won't allow himself to be drawn into the petty "religious" wars that plague the world of programming -- the endless disputes over such issues as whether one programming language, or operating system, is inherently better than another. Such flame wars are a favorite hobby for hackers who are fond of declaiming in terms that allow no wiggle room -- ambiguity being foreign to the fundamental either/or, yes/no, zero/one digitalness of the computing universe. But Wall and Perl are all about wiggle room, about messy imperfection and fuzzy creativity. After all, duct tape is valuable not because it offers a perfect solution to your plumbing problems, but because it gets the job done. Perl, to some eyes, may not seem elegant. But that's not Wall's concern. His humble goal is to be useful, to help people do what they need to do -- to facilitate the interconnection of programming languages, hardware platforms, assorted software universes and people working together into one cosmic entity. Which, if you think about it, is what the Web is all about, too. It's no accident that Perl, which Wall first invented more than a decade ago, didn't really start to explode until the Web took off in 1994. The Web is a hacked-together, messy, ad-hoc creation that requires fast thinking and faster reaction times. Perl is a Web hacker's best friend. N E X T_ P A G E .|. How Larry Wall changed the whole culture of computing - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY TIM BOWER