Larry Wall is an American computer programmer best known as the creator of the programming language Perl. He developed Perl in the late 1980s to help with text processing tasks, and it quickly gained popularity for its flexibility and power in web development and system administration. In addition to his work on Perl, Wall is known for his contributions to the open-source software movement. He has been an advocate for collaborative software development and has influenced many programmers through his writings and philosophy on programming, emphasizing the importance of community and creativity in coding.