Larry Wall's Very Own Home Page
Oh man, this brings back memories.<p>Larry Wall is a wonderful human who I had the privilege of meeting back in college.  He came out for a summer tech conference we were hosting and was the keynote speaker.  When we broke out into small groups he was in mine and we chatted a bit.  He was the first internet famous person I had ever met - kind and unassuming, and also the creator of something highly successful in the Perl programming language.<p>Perl was one of the original web languages and the Swiss Army knife of scrappy programmers and sysadmins everywhere.  It was a direct influence on many more recent programming languages, including Python and Ruby to name a few.<p>My friends and I discovered this very own home page back around the time I met him some 10 years ago.  It was where I first learned the word &quot;chartreuse&quot;, and I&#x27;m still not fully sure what color that refers to.  You can find some of his writings under the &quot;My Ravings&quot; section, which are a hoot.<p>One of my favorites of his writings is The Three Virtues of a programmer (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;threevirtues.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;threevirtues.com&#x2F;</a>):<p>Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don&#x27;t have to answer so many questions about it.<p>Impatience: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don&#x27;t just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.<p>Hubris: The quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won&#x27;t want to say bad things about.