Larry was genial and forthcoming during our interview as he explained how Perl was born as a top secret project at the National Security Agency. His boss asked him to design a software tool for configuring two sets of computers remotely, one on the East Coast and one on the West. But Larry—who once wrote that the three great virtues of programmers are their laziness, impatience, and hubris—was loath to spend a month coding a widget that could be used for only a single task. Instead, he crafted Perl and slipped a tape containing the source code into his pocket before walking out the door.
