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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 | PAGE 1, 2, 3 - - - - - - - - - - "I try to get the right amount of levity and gravity simultaneously," says Wall, sitting in the moderately cluttered living room of his Mountain View home. He's talking specifically about Perl, but his attitude is built into the infrastructure of his daily life. Wall has Caller ID hooked up to his computer, which he has instructed to emit unique sounds for each incoming call. What good is Caller ID, asks Wall, if you have to walk all the way over to the telephone to see who is calling? Likewise, pressing his doorbell sets off a sequence of dialogue from a Wallace and Gromit claymation cartoon, and when his dryer -- hidden away in the garage -- finishes its cycle, a whistling sound shoots through the entire house. Wall's professional background is as a system administrator, rather than as a software engineer. "Sysadmins" tend to take a utilitarian attitude toward programming and technology -- they focus on keeping balky networks running, solving pressing problems now, hacking on the fly. Wall's whole life as a programmer has been devoted to solving those kinds of problems -- Perl is just the most recent tool in his personally crafted arsenal. Years before he dreamed up Perl, he had already achieved hacker renown by writing "rn" -- a program for reading Usenet newsgroups. Rn was an early prototype for what is now called the free software or open source model for software development -- in which far-flung programmers collaborate across the Net on improving products whose code remains accessible to all. Wall wrote the rn program, released the source code to the Internet and then started work on an upgraded version that incorporated suggestions and bug fixes from fellow hackers all over the then-fledgling universe of cyberspace. But back in the mid-'80s, it wasn't easy to distribute upgrades across the Net. Often, people would be connecting via slow 300- or 1,200-baud modems, and they simply could not fling megabytes of source code back and forth in the carefree manner that is now commonplace. So Wall wrote a tiny program called "patch." Patch took a compact new code upgrade and applied it to old source code. Patch could bring that old code up to speed, and was even smart enough to take into account changes that had been hacked into the old code. As hackers go, Wall is a reasonably circumspect man, but that doesn't mean he is unfailingly modest. "Patch," says Wall, "changed the culture of computing." "I've believed for years that patch is his single most important contribution to the open-source culture, though it's never attracted the kind of notice that his bigger, sexier projects, like Perl or rn, have," says Eric Raymond, one of the most vocal leaders of the open source movement. "Patch may just be the most successful hack of all time," says Raymond. "Larry effectively created, or at least critically enabled, the modern style of highly distributed development exemplified by Linux." Perl came after patch. On the surface, it's a completely different beast, a highly complex "scripting" language aimed at programmers who need to write short bursts of code that automate tasks, connect incompatible programs and systems and otherwise solve persnickety problems. Perl's inception dates to 1986, when Wall worked as a system administrator for a subsidiary of Burroughs. At the time, he was engaged in a "secret project for the NSA" that involved synchronizing information exchange between computers in Santa Monica, Calif., and Paoli, Pa. But the NSA didn't just want the information synchronized -- it also wanted reports generated about each exchange, and none of Wall's existing tools seemed to fit the task. Getting everything together required a jury-rigged solution, a hack, that eventually became Perl -- the Practical Extraction and Report Language. "I realized at that point that there was a huge ecological niche between the C language and Unix shells," says Wall. "C was good for manipulating complex things -- you can call it 'manipulexity.' And the shells were good at whipping up things -- what I call 'whipupitude.' But there was this big blank area where neither C nor shell were good, and that's where I aimed Perl." From that point on, Wall focused his spare time and energy on exploiting the need for a language that could connect the dots across all the big blank areas in the computing universe. "People are always looking for the interstices," says Wall. "They are always looking for the new ecological niches. And the speed with which you can move into those ecological niches is really important, because the first person into a niche is often the winner." Perl was a winner. Wall ensured that Perl's particular strong points -- text processing, flexibility and a vast tool kit of built-in features for quick-and-dirty problem-solving -- made knowledge of Perl essential to programmers in a hurry: people like David Filo and Jerry Yang, the two Stanford University graduate students who created Yahoo. They found Perl indispensable. They used it to generate their Web pages, write the code for their data-collecting Web robots and maintain their database of Web addresses. "We relied on it a lot," says Filo. "Because of the quick development time, you could do things really fast." Yahoo's experience was far from unique, says Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of the computer book publishing company O'Reilly & Associates. Not only does O'Reilly publish the bestselling Perl computer books, but it also hired Wall three years ago to be a full-time evangelist for Perl. "Perl is great for winging it," says O'Reilly. "Perl is much more accessible than a traditional programming language, and I think that that was a key part of what enabled people to start building and envisioning the Web. It let the amateurs in -- you didn't have to be a professional programmer ... Even though Perl can be difficult and has a reputation for sort of being obscure, it also is pretty accessible for the kinds of things that people want to do. You can throw things together quickly and get work done." N E X T_ P A G E .|. "I tried to make the computer think a little more like a programmer"