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is the author of Perl, an open source programming language embraced by Web developers and IT professionals to solve problems in serving environments, especially serving Web documents in Unix. Perl is optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information, and printing reports, as well as for system management tasks. Wall describes it as "intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal)."
He is also one of the most prominent spokesmen for the growing movement behind open source software development. He and other developers maintain that open source development creates better software than what is developed in a corporate or proprietary environment, and that companies can still make money supplying services around the software.
Wall created Perl while he was a programmer at Unisys. He now works full-time as a researcher, developer, and author at O'Reilly & Associates in Sebastopol, Calif., where he is developing a Perl Resource Kit.
David Sims asked Wall about Netscape's recent release of the source code for its Communicator client.