photo credit: Veyis Polat

Who is Larry Wall? Many of you may not know who he is.

He is the father of Perl, a programming language that is more popular among system administrators. He created Perl in mid-1980s. You may never hear his work, but there is something we can learn from his life as a programmer and innovator.

Today I want to share the three attributes of innovators, inspired by Larry Wall as he is mentioned and described in the book Learning Perl, by Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, & brian d foy (I don’t have any idea why the last name is written in lower case).

1) Be Lazy

Some people are so diligent working on the same thing over and over. Larry is not following that status quo, he is lazy. Larry was trying to produce some reports from a Usenet news (some kind of discussion forum which is a precursor of different web forums available nowadays). Being the lazy programmer as he is, he decided to overkill the problem with a generic solution, where he can also use it in at least one other place. This is the laziness that he also puts in the three virtues of programmers.

Laziness – The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it.
Larry Wall, Randal L. Schwartz and Tom Christiansen (Programming Perl)

2) Be Greedy

Larry created Perl because he wanted the advantages of both sides of programming language. On one side, it’s the low level programming (C or C++) which is hard to write, but fast and unlimited. On the other side, it’s high level programming (”shell” programming) that slow and limited but easier to code. Larry is not satisfied with either one of them. He chose to create something that will incorporate the strength of those two. And Perl is born, easy, nearly unlimited, mostly fast and kind of ugly.

3) Be Ugly

Larry knew very well what he want to create through Perl. He chose to trade off certain thing for the goal he pursued. He knew that he could not please all people. When he had to make a trade off between features that make programmer’s life easier but make it more difficult for student to learn, he will pick the programmer’s side.

Perl has many conveniences that let programmers save time. And that results in how Perl looks ugly for the beginners. If you’re not an experienced Perl programmer, you will need some time to understand all the code and shortcuts. Perl is symbolized as a camel. Camel is kind of ugly too, but they work hard. Camel gets the job done even in a tough conditions like the desert, even if it looks ugly and smells worse, or sometimes even spit at you.

Concluding Thought

The three virtues of programmers (laziness, pride, and hubris/excessive pride) have the similar characteristics to those I’m sharing above.

Yes, it’s not all the attributes needed as an innovator, but they exactly represent the  attributes that not many people consider as virtue. Larry has turned the limitations to advantages. They have become something beneficial to Larry’s life as programmer and innovator.

Despite of the laziness, Larry took pride and believed in his solution. He worked hard at it. He introduced the Perl to the community of users. And that is followed by a number of feedbacks and questions. Larry did not grow weary on responding but he consistently grew his work on Perl.

Now Perl is widely recognize, installed in nearly every system in use today, thousands of pages of online documentation, dozens of books and several main streams of newsgroups and discussions. It’s the fruit of what Larry Wall has worked in.

Innovating,
Robert

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