He also wrote
patch, a program used by lots of people to update software, and
warp, a largely forgotten
UNIX game.
He majored in linguistics at UC Berkeley in school. From this training came one of the basic philosophies of Perl, "there's more than one way to do it". (The connection is that all languages have redundancy, because this helps our ability to understand and communicate). Perl was probably the first computer language to embrace redundancy.