However, this was not a major career change, as Wall had spent three of his eight years as an undergraduate at Seattle Pacific University working at the school's computer center. And although he met his first computer (a PDP-11) at Seattle Pacific, Wall began programming in 1972 when his high school got a programmable calculator. ``You could program 120 steps into [it] and I very nearly taught it to play tic-tac-toe -- but I just couldn't get that squeezed down to 120 steps.''

While at Seattle Pacific, Wall says he ``was vaguely acquainted with Bill Gates.'' Wall explains, ``[Gates] was still programming for the experimental college at the University of Washington and they had been jacking up the computer rates on him. So he came over and was using our little PDP 11 because we'd give him cheaper computer time.''

Since graduating from Seattle Pacific, Wall attended graduate school at U.C. Berkeley and U.C.L.A., and worked at Unisys and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In his spare time he developed several free UNIX programs, including the rn news reader, metaconfig, and Perl. He currently holds the position of Senior Scientist (``oldest hacker'') at NetLabs and resides in Mountain View, California with his wife, Gloria, and their four children. Wall says there have been a number of people who have inspired him or served as role models throughout his life. Among them are 19th century writer George Macdonald, his grandmother who earned her Ph.D. in comparative literature when she was 77, his parents, and his wife. Wall describes himself as ``one of these people who's been interested in too many things.'' It may be his diverse sets of interests that have led him to take on the development of Perl and other programs. Or perhaps it is what he refers to in Programming Perl as the ``three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris.'' But Wall says there are three things that have motivated him to invest the enormous amount of time and effort necessary to keep improving Perl. Besides a simple desire to help people and to create something with some lasting significance, Wall says he is motivated by his notion of creativity and how he believes God views the world as a work of art. ``If its okay for [God] to make certain kinds of amoral decisions than it's okay for us to be artists also and sling some paint around and make some pretty pictures. I think that I just feel deep down that its fitting in with the overall scheme of things.'' He pauses before adding, ``No pun intended.''.