Larry Wall is the creator of the Perl programming language but he’s also a linguist. This knowledge across disciplines has certainly influenced Perl and it also raises his writings above the usual, dry prose that litters the technical world. If you’ve ever read one of his State of the Onion addresses you’ll know what I mean. He is always a little… circuitous… but I always seem to come away having learnt something.
A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across an article Larry wrote about open source software. What I learnt was why the Chinese writing system has so many symbols, what the advantage is over simple western alphabets. I’m not sure that this would ever have occurred to me. I love learning things like that!
I won’t spoil the article by telling you why, you’ll have to read it for yourself. Don’t worry, it’s entirely non-technical and the fun is in the journey, isn’t it?