After a hiatus of several years working in the university's computing center, he graduated with a bachelor's degree in Natural and Artificial Languages.

[2] While in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, Wall and his wife were studying linguistics with the intention of finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and creating a writing system for it.

[3] For health reasons these plans were cancelled, and they remained in the United States, where Wall instead joined the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory after he finished graduate school.

Wall's Christian faith has influenced some of the terminology of Perl, such as the name itself, a biblical reference to the "pearl of great price" (Matthew 13:46).

[8] Similar references are the function name bless, and the organization of Raku (previously known as Perl 6) design documents with categories such as apocalypse and exegesis.