Larry Wall

author of 'patch', and more famously 'Perl', the swiss-army-chainsaw of many programmers.

the chartreuse homepage → http://www.wall.org/~larry/

on perl

“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.”

“the first postmodern computer langauge” http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html

“an artificial natural language” http://www.wall.org/~larry/perl.html