“Surprised by Dimensional Analysis: Learning to Measure the Promised Land.”
Larry Wall (who is pretending not to have written this bio) is a graduate (eventually) of Seattle Pacific University (though when he started it was College) in Natural and Artificial Languages (after trying Chemistry, Music, Premed, Greek...), after which he thought he was going to be a Wycliffe Bible Translator, so went on to study linguistics (along with Gloria (his wife)) at Cal Berkeley and UCLA (without actually finishing (because Larry is a rather non-linear person (and also because of the birth of his first child (who also graduated from Seattle Pacific (eventually))))). Since then he has worked in both industry and government, and written various programs that helped bootstrap the Open Source movement (such as "rn" and "patch" and "metaconfig"). He developed a reputation for giving funny (and occasionally insightful) speeches that tend to be about everything (except what he's actually talking about). In 1998 he was the first recipient of the Award for the Advancement of Free Software (which he will probably not talk about), which he got because he is believed to be responsible for Perl (but has since repented (in spots (which he talks about far too often))).