[LMB] Bad joke explained - Re: List Love

[Mark Allums]

Mark Allums wrote:
> James Nicoll wrote:
>>  	If god had wanted us to top-post, he wouldn't have written trn!
> 
> So Larry Wall is God?

I suppose this joke may require some background for non-computer geeks. 
  Larry Wall is a well-known programmer (among other things) who wrote 
rn, the predecessor of trn.  The letters rn stand for Read News, and 
this program was useful back in the days before fancy email clients and 
the web to read text newsgroups.  Others still use some version of it 
(notably trn) to read newsgroups.

What Wall is most famous for is for being the originator and maintainer 
of the Perl programming language, and almost every web site at one time 
used a Perl script to get things done on the server side.[1]  Today, 
Perl is used quite extensively in the *nix environment.  Larry Wall at 
one point could do no wrong, hence the sentiment, "Larry Wall is God."

--Mark Allums


1. Today, one of the more popular ways to get things done on the server 
with a web site is to use PHP with MySQL.  Perl is still used, though.