When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.

They would then use this new writing system to translate various texts into the language among them the Bible. 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. He often compares Perl to a natural language and explains his decisions in Perl's design with linguistic rationale.

Larry Wall (born September 27 1954) is a computer programmer and author most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987.