About two weeks ago, I had the good fortune to carve out a few free hours. I sat in my back yard, in my hammock, gazing at my little mountain view, in the shade on a beautiful spring day. I felt like a kid in a candy store as I leafed through a bunch of magazines. Perhaps I should list some pointers here:

Smithsonian Magazine
Scientific American
Linux Journal

All I could do was pick out a dozen or so articles I'd like to read, then read one. Time is often like a playful dog that refuses to let you catch up and pet her belly. Lucky for me, I picked a good one from the May issue of Linux Journal. I hope I don't get sued for reprinting some of the article here. Larry Wall is the author of Perl, perhaps the most widely used language for programming WWW applications. Oh yes, I should mention that perl is free. We used to write thousands of lines of Perl code at Time Inc. to do all sorts of things. I should mention that most Time Inc., products are not free. Suffice it to say, that the WWW would be a very different, and far less interesting place, without perl. Here's a snippet from the article:

Marjorie: Back in the beginning, what inspired you to write Perl?

Larry: That depends on what you mean by `beginning''. Like Moses said: `In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.'' I'm not being entirely facetious about that. Whichever way you care (or don't care) to interpret scripture, I think the universe is a pretty hefty inspiration for anyone who aspires to be a creator. I've certainly tried to put a universe of ideas into Perl, with some amount of success. In terms of biographical beginnings, my father was a pastor, as were both my grandfathers, and many of my ancestors before that. My wife likes to say that preachers are bred for intelligence (though I suppose she might be saying that just to flatter me). Be that as it may, I did receive a fairly decent set of brain construction genes. Beyond that, I also received a rich heritage of ideas and skills, some of which found their way into Perl culture. For instance, the notion that you can change the world. The idea that other people are important. The love of communication and an understanding of rhetoric, not to mention linguistics. The appreciation of the importance of text. The desire to relate everything to everything else. The passion to build up rather than tear down. And, of course, the dead certainty that true wealth is measured not by what you accumulate, but by what you pass on to others.

End snippet.

Compare this to Microsoft Executive Ed Muth's quote:

"I find it hard to believe that some of the best computer scientists in the world will want to do their work for free," he said. "Without a long-term technical road map, without multimillion-dollar test labs, someone wants me to believe these visionary programmers and developers will want to do the best work of their lives and then give it away."

I think some might consider Larry Wall to be one of the best computer scientists in the world. Sorry Mr. Muth.

You can check out my little schpiel on that one in a previous rant called More evidence of Microsoft's skewed priorities. You can check out the full Linux Journal article at the Linux Journal.