Programming Parrot in a Nutshell

About the Authors

Guido van Rossum is the creator of Python, one of the major free scripting languages (although he actually despises the word scripting and prefers to refer to Python as a very high level language). He created Python in the early 1990s at CWI in Amsterdam (the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands). He is still actively involved in the development of the language.

In 1995 he moved to the US where he now lives and works in Reston, Virginia; originally for CNRI as a researcher, then in a brief unsuccessful stint for start-up BeOpen.com, and now for Digital Creations as Director of PythonLabs, the core Python development group hosted by the same company. His home page on the web is http://www.python.org/~guido/.

Larry Wall is the inventor of Perl. He has also authored some other popular free programs available for Unix, including the rn news reader and the ubiquitous patch program. By training, Larry is actually a linguist, having wandered about both U.C. Berkeley and U.C.L.A. as a grad student. Over the course of years, he has spent time at Unisys, JPL, NetLabs, and Seagate, playing with everything from discrete event simulators to network-management systems, with the occasional spacecraft thrown in. It was at Unisys, while Larry was trying to glue together a bicoastal configuration management system over a 1200 baud encrypted link using a hacked-over version of Netnews, that Perl was born. Larry currently works for O'Reilly & Associates.