Randal L. Schwartz (born November 22, 1961), also known as merlyn, is an American author, system administrator and programming consultant. He has written several books on the
Perl programming language, and plays a promotional role within the Perl community. He was a co-host of
FLOSS Weekly.
In 1995, while working as a consultant for
Intel, he cracked a number of passwords on the company's systems. He was convicted of hacking, sentenced to five years probation, and fined. The conviction was expunged in 2007.
Career
Schwartz is the co-author of several widely used books about
Perl, a programming language, and has written regular columns about Perl for several computer magazines, including
UNIX Review,
Web Techniques, and the
Perl Journal. He popularized the
Just another Perl hacker signature programs. He is a founding board member of the
Perl Mongers, the worldwide Perl grassroots advocacy organization. He was a member of the Squeak Oversight Board,[1] which oversees the
Squeak programming language.
He has owned and operated Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. since 1985. After joining as co-host of
FLOSS Weekly, a
free software/
open source (
FLOSS) themed
podcast in 2007, he assumed the role of host in 2010 until May 2020. He has done voice work for
StarShipSofa, a science-fiction podcast.
Schwartz's name is also associated with the Schwartzian transform, an
algorithm to efficiently sort a list according to a computation, without repeating the computation many times for each element of the list. He also coined the name
spaceship operator for use in his teaching, because it reminded him of the spaceship in an HP BASIC
Star Trek game.[2]
Schwartz is a member of the F/OSS community, and has been named a "Perl Expert" and interviewed by numerous outlets – to discuss his views on Perl, Ruby, Smalltalk and other topics – including
Dr. Dobb's,[3] Paul dot Com Security TV,[4] The Command Line,[5] PerlCast,[6]FLOSS Weekly,[7] ONLamp.com,[8] and InfoQ.[9] Schwartz was also a speaker at the 2011
OSCON conference[10] and a keynote speaker at the 2010
Texas LinuxFest conference.[11]
His various books have been met with positive reviews.[12][13]
In July 1995, Schwartz was prosecuted in the case of State of Oregon vs. Randal Schwartz, which dealt with compromised computer security during his time as a system administrator for
Intel. In the process of performing
penetration testing, he cracked a number of passwords on Intel's systems.[14][15] Schwartz was originally convicted on three felony counts, with one reduced to a misdemeanor, but on February 1, 2007, his arrest and conviction records were sealed through an official
expungement, and he is legally no longer a felon.[16][17]