Tom Christiansen

Who is Tom Christiansen?

Thomas S. Christiansen, nicknamed "tchrist" or occasionally "thoth", is a Unix developer and user known for his work with the Perl programming language.

Christiansen worked for several years at TSR Hobbies before attending the University of Wisconsin - Madison where he earned B.A.'s in Spanish and Computer Science, and an M.S. in Computer Science. He worked for five years at Convex Computer. In 1993, he established the Tom Christiansen Perl Consultancy, located in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. In 2010, he joined the Biomedical Text Mining Group at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

Christiansen, with a C-and-Unix background, was one of the early contributors to Perl after its public release in 1987. He presented the first public Perl tutorial in 1989 and wrote the first academic paper to highlight Perl in 1990. He was the author of much of the core Perl documentation, including the manual pages perlfaq and perltoot, development of perl.com. In 1996, Christiansen wrote "Csh Programming Considered Harmful" about the limitations inherent in C Shell Programming. Books he co-authored include:

The second and third editions of Programming Perl.