One luxury cruise ship. A hundred hard-coding geeks. Seven sleepless nights. Welcome to the floating conference called Perl Whirl 2000.

For a hard-partying resort town of almost 1,500 people, we barely stirred a wake as we passed under the Lions Gate Bridge, the towers of Vancouver shrinking behind us as we gained latitude. The Georgia Strait bears a veritable samba line of megaships to and from Alaska during the three-month summer tourist season, but surely this was the first time in the history of the Holland America cruises that a passenger had tucked a 10Base-T network hub into his luggage, just in case .

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Long gone is the era when cruising was the exclusive domain of the champagne classes. These days it's more like a camping trip, with niche-marketed themes to bring families and younger crowds on board. There are gay cruises, seven-day Disney excursions, and oceangoing nudist camps. Now, thanks to Neil Bauman – a 42-year-old entrepreneur whose former career was hawking computer advice to America's pharmacy owners – there are geek cruises, too.

Neil sees a thriving business in putting hardcore programmers on pleasure boats to Alaska and the Caribbean, on trips with names like Database Discovery and Linux Lunacy. His year-round itineraries will offer classes targeted to code-breathing hackers – "Cool Tricks With Apache," "Multitasking: Managing Processes and Threads" – on top of a traditional menu of Fab Abs sessions and shore excursions. Activities on a typical geek cruise might also include a workshop for the spouses of "work-obsessed individuals," stump-the-hacker quiz shows, and screenings of sci-fi B movie classics like Barbarella and The Tingler . Neil's brochures promise "relaxation for the body [and] stimulation for the mind," rolling out soothing images of life aboard geek floats to places like Martinique: "You're having breakfast on the deck of a luxurious cruise ship … Caribbean breezes blow gently as you savor your first cup of coffee. You check your watch. Great, you think, it's almost time for the next XML seminar." (Coming up November 4-11: Java Jam in the Caribbean, with ports of call in the Bahamas, Key West, Cozumel, and Grand Cayman – see www.geekcruises.com.)

The first-ever geek cruise set sail from Vancouver last Memorial Day for a weeklong journey through Alaska's Inside Passage, the 200-mile network of fjords, channels, and glaciers carved into the state's southeast panhandle. The theme was Perl Whirl 2000. Onboard activities focused on the open source programming language so versatile and ubiquitous that Hassan Schroeder, Sun's webmaster at the time, was inspired to call it "the duct tape of the Internet." The inventor of Perl, Larry Wall, was on board, as were Tom Christiansen and Randal Schwartz, the authors of Learning Perl and Programming Perl, respectively. Many top-echelon Perl trainers were there as well, including Mark-Jason Dominus and Lincoln Stein from the US, and Andreas König from Germany. The prospect of communing with fellow coders while navigating the water route of the Klondike grubstakers lured programmers from 12 countries, most of them on the first cruise of their lives.

Neil's best argument for porting high tech conferencing offshore may be the exorbitant costs of an ordinary landlocked seminar. With no money going to conference center rental, Neil can commandeer the public spaces on a cruise ship for the price of printing out signs that read PRIVATE PARTY. The fee for all of the Perl Whirl activities, including the programming tutorials, was $625, with a shared stateroom and the usual round-the-clock smorgasbords on the boat adding only $180 a day. No conference fees were charged for kids and nongeek significant others. By contrast, the fourth annual Perl Conference, held in Monterey last July, cost $1,600, including tutorials; a room at the Marriott tacked on another $160 to $275 a day, not including meals.

Geek cruises are a midlife reboot for Neil, who sold his pharmacy magazine, ComputerTalk, last year, and emigrated with his family from suburban Pennsylvania to Silicon Valley. A born schmoozer perpetually grinning or shrugging in the face of some cosmic joke, Neil refers to himself as "captain" of the geek cruises, though he'd only be allowed on the bridge of a ship if the real captain offered him a tour. His wardrobe consists of Hawaiian shirts that he writes off as "uniforms," and enough sandals to do a Deadhead Imelda Marcos proud – his "flipwear." He's learned to sprinkle his enthusiasms with phrases like new conference paradigm, but he arrived at the concept for geek cruising pretty much by accident.

Back in May 1998, Neil and his family signed up for a Star Trek cruise aboard a Celebrity Cruises vessel bristling with enough Federation officers to make a Romulan Warbird think twice before decloaking anywhere near it. The niche-targeted diversions on that trip included the doctor from Babylon 5 reciting Shakespeare, and the wife of John de Lancie – Q on The Next Generation – crooning "All I Want Is Q."

A devoted Trek fan whose cell phone voicemail features Leonard Nimoy intoning, "There are no life-forms available to take your call," Neil loved it. So did his kids, Isaac and Olivia, then 9 and 10, who had the run of the ship. (They bumped into George "Sulu" Takei in an elevator, who told them, "I'm going to keep my eye on you.") It was the Baumans' first cruise, and their first visit to Alaska. In Juneau, they rented a seaplane for five hours. They soared over the Mendenhall Glacier, saw humpback whales spouting in Glacier Bay, and landed in a lake.

Despite compelling lounge attractions like Ethan "Neelix" Phillips doing stand-up comedy, Neil found himself logging a lot of time on the balcony of his cabin, reading Programming Perl, known affectionately among geeks as the Camel Book because of the illustration on its cover. (The cover of each volume in the core Perl canon, published by O'Reilly & Associates, features an animal borrowed from a freeware bestiary. Learning Perl is referred to as the Llama Book, Advanced Perl Programming is the Panther Book, and so on.) Neil felt as relaxed as he'd ever been in his life, and once he returned home he wanted to head back to Alaska immediately. But the cruise had cost a bundle, so instead he decided to trek to Oregon to enroll in a Perl tutorial taught by Randal Schwartz, who cowrote the first edition of the Camel Book with Larry Wall.

Neil loved the class – but, watching Randal cut loose after hours in a karaoke bar, he came to realize that a special kind of learning can occur when programmers and master coders hang out together casually, outside of structured seminars. He came home bursting with ideas for a new breed of conference that would combine the best parts of the Trek cruise – a community of fellow weirdos, proximity to the "stars," cruising to amazing places – with a focus on Perl. His wife, Theresa, suggested naming the business Geek Cruises, so that the new enterprise wouldn't be chained to any particular programming language.

The night before we left Vancouver, Neil threw a party for the cruisers at the Pan Pacific Hotel. He was a flurry of team spirit, handing out geekcruises.com sweatshirts and lip-balm kits ("They float!") to the arriving geeks. Another guy at the party, Bill Harp, seemed to have cast himself as unofficial cohost. Hyperkinetic and supersized, sporting a bandito mustache, Bill ferried trays of drinks around, paying particular attention to anyone who looked lonely. Introducing himself as "the guy who carries computer books to Randal's gigs," he told me that Randal – "who is famous at these things, I guess" – is his best friend. He added that he considers Randal a recovering geek.

"Randal paid sticker price for cars for years," Bill groaned, "but now he goes out and he even has girlfriends!"

Tom Christiansen seemed distracted when Neil introduced me as his date for a week of dinners on the ship at a "wizards' table" that would include Larry Wall. Tom was in high-stress mode because the proofs for the third edition of the Camel Book were due back at the publisher immediately after the cruise. Later, Bill suggested that Tom's bad mood might also have been explained by his proximity to Randal. They were engaged in a semipublic feud, he said, rolling his eyes when I asked for details. They've tried to avoid being in the same room for years.

On the geek cruise activity list: stump-the-hacker quiz shows and screenings of sci-fi B movie classics like Barbarella and The Tingler.

On the boat, Bill was the first cruiser to jump in the pool – fully dressed, and only minutes after we pulled away from the dock. The gesture was a welcome whiff of mutiny after the compulsory lifeboat drill, during which geeks in orange life jackets were herded by Dutch officers who clearly relished the opportunity to bark orders at the passengers under the pretext of saving their lives.

At first sight, the Volendam seemed huge: a labyrinth of plush lounges, restaurants, and bars, with deck after deck of staterooms in an infinite regress to a hazy point at the other end of the ship. Misty, starlit paintings of the Holland America fleet – the Ryndam, Veendam, Zaandam, and so on – adorned the stairway walls, with the same effect as the solemn founders' portraits on the walls of small-town banks. Bright red carpet stretched in all directions. As we sailed from the Georgia Strait into the Seymour Narrows toward Alaska, the hills around us gradually increased in height, shading from dark green to violet, and lighthouses flashed from rocky outposts.

At dinner that first night, I met my companions at the wizards' table: Larry and Gloria Wall; Tom Christiansen; Tim Bray, Lauren Wood, and their 11-month-old, Sean; and a soft-spoken young programmer named Chris. With the exception of meals, Larry spent most of the cruise holed up in his cabin, proofreading the Camel Book, emerging for special events in fluorescent tuxedos snatched up at a going-out-of-business sale.

The expertise at the table was multidisciplinary. Larry, Gloria, and Tom had done graduate work in languages and linguistics as well as computer science. Tim is one of the editors of the XML spec, and he also managed the software development team of the New Oxford English Dictionary Project at the University of Waterloo. Lauren, a heavyweight geek in her own right, holds a PhD in theoretical physics. The conversational tone was established from the start: a finely honed, teasing banter that roamed hungrily over a broad range of interests. There was speculation as to why so many gifted programmers and mathematicians are also musicians; discussion of The Economist 's use of the typographically redundant "dot.com"; and debate about whether the gliding tones in Cantonese are audible in singing. The one thing the wizards didn't talk about much over dinner was Perl.

Bill also had his mind on things other than code. The next morning, as I was standing in line at the breakfast buffet, he trotted over and whispered, "I got strippers!" Two of the cruisers, James Ownbey and Jasmine Merced, were getting married the next day in Juneau on top of a glacier, and Bill was not going to let the occasion pass quietly.

He informed me that he had "lined up two attractive male crew members and two incredibly attractive female crew members," hedging his gender bets to pique my interest. "I went up to these Dutch officers and said, 'I have a problem. I need strippers.' And they said, 'It is impossible!' Well, a drink and a substantial offer of money later … You're not gonna believe these girls!"

Absorbing this news, I sat down to breakfast with four young software developers from a company called Active.com whom I'd met the night before in the Crow's Nest, the bar on the topmost deck of the ship. These guys live in the trenches of the open source wars – they're 60-hour-a-week coders who ignore their managers' inducements to buy off-the-shelf widgets, instead hacking anything they need in Perl, which is freeware. When a hairy deadline looms, they sleep on army cots in a tent in their office; this has prompted their landlord to write a letter threatening to evict them for violating the no-lodging clause in their lease. On weekends, they relax by jamming on software projects of their own.

Tim Falzone was using Perl to code what he calls an image browser. He wondered what it would be like to follow trails of visual associations through the Web, rather than drilling from text to text. Responding to a click on any image online, his browser takes the name of the file and searches through a dictionary for words that match it. Because many images are tagged with abbreviations, the software also sounds out names phonetically, pulling words like "mountain" out of "mtn.jpg." These words are then fed into a search engine, a URL is chosen at random, and the images behind that link are loaded into the window. Tim showed me screenshots of the collages produced by his software, and they were beautiful – as organically associative as dreams. For Tim and his peers, tools like Perl are an open-ended vehicle of casual ingenuity, allowing them to riff together in code the same way their parents cranked out tunes in garages.

Another hacker in the group, a brawny coder named Michael Granger, served in Operation Desert Storm. After the war was over, he slept under a bridge for nine months because he couldn't reconcile the fears he'd felt out in the desert with getting an apartment and a job. Before he became a programmer, he wrote poetry. I asked him if he missed it. "I feel that there is a muse, and what she wants is for me to be creative," he replied. "She doesn't care if I'm writing poetry or code."

Strictly speaking, the core of Perl is a chunk of classified spookware that belongs to the United States government.

In 1986, Larry Wall was working for a subsidiary of Burroughs on a project codenamed Blacker. The client was the National Security Agency. One aim was to develop what are called multilevel secure wide-area networks. Larry was in charge of an installation in California that consisted of three VAX machines and three Suns linked over an encrypted line to a similar array in Pennsylvania. His supervisor asked him to develop a program that would enable him to configure the machines on both coasts, while generating reports about these interactions. He was given a month to come up with something.

These guys live in the trenches of the open source wars. On weekends, they relax by jamming on software projects of their own.

Larry has written that three attributes of the typical hacker are "laziness, impatience, and hubris"; it went against his grain to spend a month coding a widget that could be used for only one task. So he crafted Perl, a tool that would work in a diverse range of programming situations, and then he pocketed a tape containing the source code for his invention.

By the time he created Perl, Larry was already a hacker of considerable renown. In 1984, he wrote his first widely adopted software tool, a reader for Usenet news called rn, one of the first programs that let people follow newsgroup discussions by topic – siphoning a river into drinkable streams. His other early triumph was called patch. A masterpiece of practical thinking and elegant coding, patch made it possible for hackers to distribute upgraded versions of their code without having to upload and download entire programs, by keeping track of the changes that had been made in a piece of software. It transformed the nature of collaborative programming, becoming a cornerstone of what Eric Raymond, in his seminal open source essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," called the "bazaar" model of software development.

Both rn and patch embodied the spirit of Unix hackerdom, which was an open source culture before the term open source was invented. If you wrote a powerful piece of code, it was like a scientific discovery, and you wanted to share it. The highest form of hacker praise was that a tool you made would be put to work all over the place.

"Perl" is usually glossed as "Practical Extraction and Report Language," and occasionally as "Pathetically Eclectic Rubbish Lister." Both are retronyms. Originally, Larry wanted to name his new language Pearl, a word with positive connotations. Larry considers himself as much a linguist as a hacker. He's also a fan of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings . There are doorways into Tolkien's imagination built right into the core of Perl. Each section of the source code begins with a quote from the Rings trilogy – say, "A fair jaw-cracker dwarf language must be." If you understand the epigram, you comprehend what that section is designed to do. Larry wanted to give Perl a name that suggested that it was worth treasuring.

Furthermore, Larry is a devout Christian – he's the son of a fundamentalist Mennonite preacher from a long line of preachers. In the 13th book of Matthew, Jesus tells the parable of a merchant "seeking goodly pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it" – "it" being the Kingdom of Heaven. But there was already another programming language called Pearl. So Larry – whose personal motto, which has become the mantra of the Perl community, is "There's more than one way to do it" – christened his new creation Perl.

Though Perl doesn't get the media attention that is lavished on Java, software written in the language is embedded throughout many tools and networks that we use every day, quietly executing critical functions. Hassan Schroeder's duct tape metaphor is apt, because Perl is most at home in the interstices of other programs and systems – say, passing data between databases and Web pages. The first interactive sites on the Web employed a Perl module called CGI.pm, which was written by Lincoln Stein, one of the instructors aboard the Volendam .

One testament to Perl's broad usefulness was the diversity of the programmers on the boat. In an article written for The Perl Journal, Lincoln, a bioinformatics researcher, detailed how Perl "saved" the Human Genome Project from a database crisis at labs in England and the US. Monjay Settro of cbs.com told me her site's entire production cycle has been retooled in Perl. Dick Hardt runs a thriving software business called ActiveState at the crossroads of the Perl and Windows worlds. Elizabeth Mattijsen and Wendy van Dijk used Perl and other open source software to build the first Web-hosting provider in the Netherlands. A Minnesota gadgeteer named Bruce Winter wrote a program called MisterHouse that allows him to pick up the phone in his kitchen and ask for the outside temperature, have his email read to him, or request that the bedroom curtains be shut.

Perl is especially adept at working with text. The Pontifex encryption software in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon was written in it. This facility with words makes Perl as useful for spammers as for Amazon.com. Among hackers, Perl's most prized virtue is what Larry once called its whipupitude : It's particularly handy for whipping up potent little programs in a hurry. As a result, Perl has become the Swiss Army chain saw of overworked systems administrators everywhere.

After Larry created Perl, he gave it away, distributing the source code on the Net. It is upgraded, ported into all the major OS environments, and promoted by an army of volunteers – the Perl 5 Porters and Perl Mongers who hold regular meetings in most major cities. Part of the reason there's so little hype about it is that, unlike Java, Perl has never had a Sun shining behind it with a corporate PR machine ensuring that every tech-mag stringer heard it was the next big thing. While Linux is the golden boy of the open source movement, proving that a loose confederation of hackers jamming outside the domain of commerce could code their own bitchin' OS, Perl is the quietly pervasive open source success story.

Perl's grassroots vibe (Larry calls it a "blue-collar language") made it an auspicious choice for the theme of the first geek cruise. As Collin Starkweather, one of the coders from Active.com, put it: "Perl is the language of choice for people who code recreationally and relish the company of other coders."

This sense of playfulness was palpable all over the ship, in streamlined exchanges like this that could never happen on a mailing list:

JASMINE: May I ask a quick question?
RANDAL: (drinking coffee and eating a cookie) Sure, but don't make me talk too much.
JASMINE: When using strict …
RANDAL: (smile, nod )
JASMINE: … and using libraries or modules, strict doesn't …
RANDAL: (shakes head)
JASMINE: … and there's no way …
RANDAL: (shakes head )
JASMINE: Thanks.

Strictly speaking, the core of Perl is a chunk of classified spookware that belongs to the United States government.

In class, these elegant dances could look like martial art. During Tim Bray's seminar "Perl, XML, and Really Big Data," Tim felt the concentrated sense of purpose shared by senior technology adepts who have worked with their tools for a very long time. In that seasoned company, he told me, "when people hear something they don't agree with or understand, they come at you with total aggression, which is almost completely devoid of a personal-attack dimension: 'That can't be true because' or 'that won't work because.' It's like playing go or fencing, but unlike go or fencing, you make progress toward greater understanding. We did a lot of that, and the experience was way more intense than going up the side of a mountain."

The 167 geeks – more than a dozen of whom were female programmers – were just a small segment of the Volendam 's passenger list, which numbered close to 1,300 (plus 150 crew members). The normal diversions of a cruise-ship vacation were always unfolding in the background – the Yukon gold nugget auctions, crepe-cooking exhibitions, and slot machine marathons. Dori Smith's "Introduction to JavaScript" class, held in one of the dining rooms, was nearly drowned out by a wine tasting. Conversations about the initiative to rewrite Perl's source code in C++ were conducted across the room from disco aerobics sessions: "All right, girls … shampoo!" Some distractions were welcome. One day, classes were interrupted by a young orca exploding out of the icy water to starboard, in flights of careless exuberance.

But one aspect of cruise-ship life was annoying for the younger programmers, who didn't like being told what to wear to dinner. The issue of the "formal nights" in the dining room – jacket and tie required – erupted in email weeks before the cruise. "I am DEEPLY DISTURBED by the dress code issue. I believe it will sink your ship," Tom Christiansen warned Neil ominously. To underscore the gravity of the situation, Tom sent along a copy of Eric Raymond's essay "A Portrait of J. Random Hacker." ("It is not uncommon," Raymond wrote, "for hackers to quit a job rather than conform to a dress code.") The essay, he advised Neil, "should probably be passed on to your contacts. The crew and staff need to understand what they're getting themselves into."

In the end, Neil handed out bow ties at the pre-launch party that were custom-made out of red, white, and blue silk; these passed muster with the maître d' while retaining a geeky touch. It was a Perlish solution, in the spirit of "There's more than one way to do it." On Dutch Night, when traditional caps for men and women were set at every place in the dining room, many of the geeks simply switched hats.

The night before Wednesday's wedding – 15 minutes before stripper time – Bill greeted me with a bellowing "Whazzup?!" on the Lido Deck. Recumbent at a poolside table in a veil of cigarette smoke, wearing a black sweater over a black shirt and green tie, he looked like a black boulder marbled with jade. He seemed confident that all would Go As Planned. "They've already got the money," he declared.

Rumors of the impending spectacle had been humming through the geek ranks all day. The biggest news was that Randal himself would take it all off for the women in the Wajang Theater on the Promenade Deck while Bill's strippers went to work in the Crow's Nest. But the scene in the disco didn't look promising. Only about a third of the geek cruisers seemed to be there; James, the groom, was smoking alone at the bar. I walked over and offered to buy him a drink. He looked relieved.

"Wang Wang," he requested.

"Sorry?"

"I don't know – it's a Bill thing," he shrugged.

The Wang Wang turned out to be a house specialty – a powerhouse of gin, vodka, rum, scotch, bourbon, tequila, brandy, triple sec, orange juice, pineapple, and grenadine. The '70s disco anthems that signify sexual abandon in every bar on the planet pounded at a punishing volume, to the delight of a few thirtysomething lambada fanatics who turned up in the Crow's Nest every night but were never seen anywhere else on the ship.

Then Randal appeared, looking sheepish. The management had gotten wind of Bill's plan. His two male strippers had been seen leaving the Wajang Theater with a boom box and several pairs of cowboy boots, trailed by the ship's security staff. The female strippers had chickened out. Without the girls, Randal said, he wouldn't do it either.

The DJ kept piling on the decibels. An attractive young woman from the boat's nongeek population lurched over on a tide of Wang Wangs. "I found a man" she proclaimed, adding, "He's gay, but at least he's cute. I can pretend." I didn't have the heart to look for James.

But amazingly, by the next morning, rumors had spread around the ship that one or the other of the strip shows had taken place. I was beginning to realize that Bill was as much of a hacker as Randal, but his specialty was hacking human networks rather than computer networks. Even when his plans tanked, he knew how to keep a buzz alive.

He was also driving Tom Christiansen up a wall.

In some prank orchestrated by the god of random events, Tom had drawn a stateroom assignment right next door to Randal and Bill's. Because the cabin numbers were staggered, Neil didn't notice this until reservations were frozen in place. It was, Neil reflected later, "the one really great big fucking mistake on the whole cruise."

Tom is a man who packs a pair of earplugs when he leaves his house in the Colorado mountains, because the ordinary cacophonies of urban life send him into shock. He's willing to browse the Web only after disabling the autoloading of images, Java, JavaScript, and cookies, behind a dedicated proxy (written, of course, in Perl) to filter out ads and flickering colors.

Bill is a human <BLINK> tag.

Among hackers, Perl's most prized virtue is its whipupitude: It's handy for whipping up potent little programs in a hurry.

For Tom, it might be hard to imagine a less acceptable friend for a proper hacker; but Bill and Randal are inseparable. "Bill is sort of a fact," Randal once explained to Neil. He's been a fact in Randal's life for a long time.

When Randal was in the 10th grade in Colton, Oregon, he hacked a real-time chat system on his old school's computer so he could talk to classmates he left behind after his family moved 30 miles away. This gave Randal his first taste of fame: When he logged in, everyone recognized his handle. Writing code, he felt like he was in a zone where he could exert control; he felt clumsy around kids his own age. "I didn't have peer pressure because I didn't have peers," he says. He left high school when he was 16 to take a $14,500-a-year job at Tektronix, writing manuals and supervising people who were much older than he was.

In suburban Oregon in the late '70s, one of the few places where kids could hang out together was the local roller rink. There, Randal was able to get out of his head for a while, doing high kicks under the disco balls. One night, the DJ found himself without a ride home after his girlfriend dumped him. Randal offered him a lift. It was Bill.

"I watched everything that Bill did, and tried to emulate him the best I could. Even though he was three years younger, he became like my big brother," Randal told me one afternoon in the Crow's Nest. Bill even volunteered to screen prospective dates for Randal, so he wouldn't have to deal with flat-out rejections. After the publication of the Camel Book, Bill encouraged Randal to sing karaoke, which loosened him up enough to feel at ease in front of a room full of hackers.

On our first day cruising the Inside Passage, Randal kicked off his seminar by screening scenes from Titanic . His modus operandi is to draw people out. When a student asks a question, Randal reinforces the act of speaking up by saying "Yes, yes" while he listens. Even his examples of Perl code, employing the names of Gilligan's Island characters as text strings, had obviously been chosen to make his students feel comfortable. Dancing with his laser pointer, Randal is a natural teacher. Perl classes are his jazz.

Randal's most infamous hack was the "Just Another Perl Hacker" meme, which started out as a series of riffs in his .sig file. Randal had been signing newsgroup posts "Just Another Perl Hacker" when, in the spring of 1990, it occurred to him that he could insert Perl scripts into his .sig that would cause a reader's computer to display those words in increasingly elaborate ways. One .sig produced the phrase in Morse code, and then translated it into English. Eventually, Randal was spending up to an hour coding each .sig. It was all in fun, but Randal's goof played a subtle role in the emerging Perl community by implying that there was something like a Perl Nation.

In 1993, Randal hacked his way into a different kind of notoriety when he became a test case for the Oregon Computer Crime Law while contracted as a systems administrator at Intel. Trying, he says, to demonstrate the incompetence of the security staff, he ran a password-cracking tool. The software easily nailed 48 out of 600 passwords in the company, including that of an Intel VP. Randal's contract was terminated, and he became the second person to be prosecuted under a piece of legislation that made a criminal out of anyone who "knowingly and without authorization alters" computer networks, data, or software.

Knowing and unauthorized alteration of data and networks – isn't that a hacker's job description? But the felony conviction was no joke. Randal was given five years' probation, ordered to perform 480 hours of community service, serve 90 days in jail, and pay $68,000 in damages to Intel. The jail time was suspended, but the legal bills mounted to more than $220,000.

Perl hackerdom came to the rescue. A legal fund and a Friends of Randal Schwartz Web site were launched. Randal hit the road lecturing as "Just Another Convicted Perl Hacker," teaching classes all over the country to the programmers who were busy turning Perl into the duct tape of the Internet.

In contrast to Randal's disarming manner, Tom's teaching style was a lot like his dinner conversation: teasing and confrontational in a way that keeps his students parrying with their wit.

Boyish and mercurial, Tom has a way of flashing his green eyes that is submissive and superior at the same time, like a child who has decided to be naughty and knows that you know it. One of the cruisers described Tom's role on online mailing lists as "the tribal mind of Perl." He's intimately familiar with every nuance of the language, in the way that a combination lexicographer and poet would be with the contents of the OED.

Even in offhanded conversation, he sculpts phrases with the elegant formalism of a master coder. I asked Tom one morning how the proofreading of the Camel Book was going. He replied:"This is my nth cup of coffee, when n is very high." As gatekeeper of the tribal mind, he can be imperious and inflexible. A young hacker told me he was afraid to post scripts inspired by Tom's code to CPAN – the online Perl repository – because he feared his criticism.

Among the "holy trinity" of Larry, Tom, and Randal, Tom is considered the least tolerant of questions that "fall beneath his threshold of idiocy," as one geek put it. Tom told me he was disappointed when a "wizards"mailing list on perl.com attracted a lot of newbie queries. He thought it was clear that it was a list for wizards, a place where advanced programmers could address sophisticated issues in the code.

Growing up in Wisconsin in the '70s, Tom was one of the youngest role-playing gamers ever hired by Gary Gygax, the inventor of Dungeons & Dragons. Gygax, a neighbor of the Christiansen family in Lake Geneva, recalls that Tom liked to hang around the older kids. "He was very bright and precocious, and enjoyed harassing the older players – his brother Neal and my son Ernie included – for fun and attention. I recall quite a few youthful set-tos because of that," Gygax says, adding, "I don't think he ever lost a character due to bad play."

As a teenager, Tom preferred the company of Robinson Crusoe and the imaginary universes of Asimov and Heinlein to TV. He read Lord of the Rings 13 times before he was 14. He wrote his first programs to generate character attributes for role-playing games. By his sophomore year in college, Tom was hacking code that would emulate Unix commands on CP/M machines. When he got his first C compiler, it was a revelation: What used to take him a week to program could now be coded in a day. It was his first taste of the accelerated learning that was possible in a high-level programming environment like Perl.

When Perl hit the news spool in December 1987, it was just what Tom was waiting for. Already a fan of rn and patch, Tom recognized that Larry had written a program offering many of the functions available in the traditional Unix tool kit of interchangeable components in one intuitive package. Tom carried the gospel to LISA, the association of Large Installation System Administrators. He pushed Perl at Usenix "@ parties," attended by the most respected coders in the industry, and proselytized on Usenet. And he wrote the first three Perl FAQs.

Conversations about the initiative to rewrite Perl's source code in C++ were conducted across the room from disco aerobics.

When he finally met Larry at a Usenix conference in Dallas in 1991, they spent the whole week together. They had so many interests in common, not just computers, but also a passion for language and a love of books – especially Lord of the Rings . Plus, they were both Christians. "I loved Larry's quietness, the serenity, the care in what was said," Tom recalls.

"Larry liked to think of me as his Saul of Tarsus. I had seen the light, and I had to tell all the Gentiles about it," Tom told me one afternoon on the Promenade Deck. Which is why he was confused when he found out that Larry was writing the first Perl book with someone he'd barely heard of – Randal Schwartz.

"I've never told Larry this, but I was really hurt," he said. "We had come from the same world of books, and music, and linguistics. We came from the same church. When the first Camel Book came out and this person's name was on it … it felt like some used car salesman's name was on it, or a vacuum cleaner salesman. Randal is not from the educated class."

The Volendam docked in Juneau shortly after noon on Wednesday.

A limousine driver picked up James and Jasmine at the end of the gangway to get the marriage certificate. It was to be a mixed marriage:James is a nongeek who works in marketing, and Jasmine runs several hardcore Perl Web sites, such as perlarchive.com. In his tuxedo, James looked like a young king. The bride had a cough, but glowed in her dress, silver-dollar-sized flowers woven through her thick black hair. She confessed she had been feeling a little nervous that morning, so she took a class in Perl regular expressions – a hacker to the core. At a small airport, we climbed into a helicopter with Juneau marriage commissioner Russ Hansen. One of the airport staff tried to talk Jasmine into replacing her high heels with boots for the trip up to the glacier, but she refused.

A helicopter is the Jedi jet cycle you've always dreamed of, with fluid command of three-dimensional space – point and shoot. We sprang up into sunshine over all the geometries that ice coursing over granite can make, dipping to inspect crevasses under our Plexiglas-enclosed room. Below us, in a high-altitude tent camp, sled dogs kicked up puffs of glittering dust.

Because the ice is perpetually in motion, new landing places have to be scouted on a regular basis. Russ and the pilot spotted a promising purchase in the snow, dotted with green and blue pools of unfrozen water that looked like melted gemstone. "Let's set down gently and see if the ice'll hold us," the pilot said. It crunched and gave a bit under our pontoons, but held. We climbed out onto light gray hard pack. I planted my foot 6 inches outside our patch of ice and sank in snow up to my knee. Before the ceremony began, Russ allowed James and Jasmine several minutes of silence.

The litany for the ceremony was unexpectedly poignant. The exact place on the glacier where you're standing, Russ told the couple, won't exist for anyone else. Your footprints can never be walked in again, because the ice is always flowing. Then he posed the familiar, cadenced questions to the bride and groom, the spells we use to sanctify a bond between souls. The exchange of rings never seemed so intimate and precious as it did in this church with no walls.

Meanwhile, down in Juneau, Adam "Ziggy" Turoff, cofounder of the Perl Mongers, was leading the geeks on a pub crawl. Like many hacker subspecies, Perl programmers are often as enthusiastic about ales and single-malt scotches as they are about code. The geeks' first stop was the Alaska Brewery, a shrine to microbrew mavens because of its rarely exported Amber Ale. From there the group's blue school bus, driven by a chain-smoking local, careened to an off-the-beaten-path joint called Teal's, sideswiping an SUV on the way in. The arrival of a busload of irregular customers overwhelmed the bartender, but Bill grabbed a waiter's tray and began taking orders. The size of the group also appalled the staff at the Red Dog Saloon, a Gold Rush tourist trap with sawdust on the floor, so Bill marched everyone down to the Alaskan Hotel. Then he ran next door to a taqueria and ordered up a mess of tacos and quesadillas, even bursting into the kitchen to help cook and stuff it all in bags. By this time, with $1,600 worth of Chinook Ale and Guinness under their belts, some of the best minds in high tech were swaying along diverse axes with a compensatory motion, as if they'd never stepped off the Volendam.

I happened to be returning from the wedding on the glacier, passing the Alaskan Hotel, when I heard Bill's battle cry emanate from an open window and echo through the streets of Juneau: "WANG WANG!" Two Dutch officers from the ship, on the sidewalk outside the bar, blanched, recovered, and walked on.

From the hotel, the geeks took the Mt. Roberts Tramway up toward Gastineau Peak. Bill convinced the bartender on the observation deck – which was closing up for the night – to pour one last, very long round. At 9 pm on an exceptionally warm last day of May – with the sun shining as brightly as if it were midafternoon – the hackers, in their T-shirts and shorts, ran outside and had a snowball fight.

By midweek, the geeks' presence was working changes on the Volendam.

The '70s disco anthems that signify sexual abandon in every bar on the planet pounded at a punishing volume.

Cabin stewards attempting to vacuum the endless hallways of the Main, Verandah, and Navigation decks found power outlets harder to come by – they were being monopolized by extension cords trailing into rooms occupied by recreational coders. The Perl classes were having a confounding effect on the ship's audiovisual resources; Neil was playing a shell game of stashing overhead projectors and portable screens (normally employed for, say, Peter Max art auctions) in various closets to keep them available for use by the wizards.

One of the sweetest little victories was the disabling of the gazillion-dollars-an-hour Digital Seas browsing software on a computer in the onboard Internet café.

It wasn't really something a true cracker could be proud of – just a trivial hack involving a reboot of the machine (unlocked cabinet – tsk, tsk!) and an Escape key. One hackish fillip was the installation of an Opera browser on the violated machine, to enable payment-free access after hours.

I'd envisioned traffic jams in the Digital Seas caused by bandwidth-starved Net addicts, but I never saw more than a couple of geeks using the service during the entire voyage. Several cruisers mentioned that they felt they were learning more by not being immersed in the chatter of email. One of the biggest innovations of Neil's new conference paradigm may be that it reminds geeks of the virtues of being out of touch with the networks they've built.

By the time we sailed as far north as Skagway, there were only four hours of darkness before the sun popped over the horizon again. It was easy for the younger geeks in the Crow's Nest to coast into the next morning, scramble down to the Main Deck for a shower, and head to class. It didn't matter that the bars closed at 2 or 3; they just busted out provisions they picked up onshore. Another all-night scene developed around the Lido pool, where Bill had trayloads of Wang Wangs delivered before last call.

It was warm enough to stroll outside in the late dusk wearing a spring jacket. The short nights increased the sexual juju in the air, and a couple of geek ménages à trois developed on the lower decks. Another couple, on the cruise with their kids, made love in the closet of their suite. Two honeymooners, Morrie and Glenn Killian, lit some candles, opened a bottle of champagne (a gift from Captain Neil), and conceived a child.

Some of the younger geeks found the schedules and the endless stream of cheerleading announcements over the ship's PA increasingly annoying. "There's this whole mystique on the boat about the captain, but this is a service industry," Rod Adams from Zilliant.com told me. "I don't respect my network manager. If the network crashes, it's a big problem. Boat crashes: big problem. What's the captain? A boat manager. I arranged my whole life so no one would ever tell me where to go and what to wear. I don't have that life this week."

Lee Devlin must have appeared to the nongeek passengers as a kind of otherworldly wirehead, striding around the deck of the Volendam in his sunglasses, carrying a metal Christmas tree pointed into the sky.

What he was actually carrying was an antenna aimed at a small object skimming just outside the atmosphere. Lee was "working a bird," as they say in ham-radio parlance: transmitting and receiving radio signals from a low-orbiting satellite. While Lee was in the satellite's "footprint," the crackling voices of other hams cascaded in an enthusiastic cacophony of greeting, as if Lee had opened the door to a room containing a small crowd of guys waiting for him. This crowd, however, was scattered all over. "This is Randy from Park City, Utah … Southeast Arizona here, howdy to everybody on board the ship … Hello from Idaho Falls, Idaho … This is Travis Air Force Base."

"This is K0LEE," he answered, "aboard a cruise ship off the coast of Alaska."

A convergence of technologies in recent years has made this kind of low-res, high-altitude conversation possible. Inexpensive handi-talkies allow hams to exchange signals with the birds and transmit data about their location. The satellites themselves, sponsored by universities and amateur radio organizations like Amsat (www.amsat.org), are sent up in place of ballast on larger commercial spacecraft. Hams can even work the Mir space station and gab with the cosmonauts, who welcome this diversion from the tedium of space flight.

Programs are available on- and offline that calculate the orbits of the satellites; hams can use these to help them aim their antennas as the satellites pass overhead, opening the door to conversation for 10 to 15 minutes on each pass, for four to five passes per day. Satellite radio enthusiasts have subdivided the globe into thousands of rectangular blocks called gridsquares. When a conversation is successfully executed via satellite from a location for the first time, a new gridsquare is said to be activated. By heading out twice a day with his handi-talkie, Lee activated 15 new gridsquares during the cruise, chatting up hams from Alabama to Nome. One of the passengers from the boat's general population seemed especially interested in what Lee was doing. After the satellite passed over, he walked over and introduced himself – with his ham-radio call sign.

One ambitious megahack that promises to bring together ham and satellite networks, the Global Positioning System, and the Internet is the Microship project of Steven Roberts, a gangly, contagiously friendly former journalist who calls himself a "tech nomad." Midway through the cruise, Steven hosted a seminar at which he sketched out his plans to sail two solar-powered, wired-to-the-hilt trimarans – the Io and the Europa – in March 2001 on a 15,000-mile river tour of the United States.

Steven will be the skipper of the Io, and his partner, Natasha Clarke, will captain the Europa. As the trimarans sail up the Columbia River, down the Missouri, east to the Mississippi, and on to Steve's childhood home in Kentucky (the itinerary reads like a poem by Whitman), they'll trail a data wake of telemetry, weather conditions, voice, video, and even songs composed on onboard MIDI synthesizers by the captains – all funneled to the Web.

It's a tinkerer's fantasy, but Steven has been hardwiring his daydreams for a living since 1983, when he slipped out of a suburban mortgage in Ohio to bicycle across the country on a hand-built, ham-radio-equipped recumbent contraption called the Winnebiko. It looked weird, but was enough to propel Steven into the mobile wraparound-Net future some 20 years ahead of the crowd. A solar-powered rig allowed him to type reports of his odyssey on a handlebar keyboard, and these were uploaded to CompuServe via roadside pay phones.

Among the Perl geeks on the Volendam, Steven found a community of programmers who are adept at carving out pathways between systems and cobbling networks out of other networks. One of these "volunteer wizards" (as Steven calls them), Ned Konz, will code the front-end database of each Microship in Perl and Smalltalk. Steven also hooked up with Steve Dimse, an emergency room physician from Miami, who's using Perl to build a bridge between a ham-radio application called the Automatic Position Reporting System (APRS) and the Web. The APRS takes location data from any device containing a GPS chipset – from dog collars to palmtops – and transmits it across the ham-radio network. A computer in Dimse's house stores these reports in a database, which also contains updates of local weather conditions gleaned from amateur radio stations around the world. Maps are generated on the fly and displayed on a Web site called findu.com. The tracking systems on the Io and Europa will be linked to Dimse's network. Steven told me that he felt at home on the boat because he loves "people who are motivated purely by the desire to make really cool things – by that old hobbyist energy that used to drive everything."

At 9 pm, with the sun shining as brightly as if it were midafternoon, the hackers, in T-shirts and shorts, ran outside and had a snowball fight.

He gave the Volendam staff a taste of that energy on a tour of the bridge finagled by the geeks. What the boat needed, Steven decided, was a more sophisticated visual display system for the passengers, with live video feeds of the navigators at work. The next day, he was exchanging faxes with the Holland America office, sketching out how this could be done.

The Volendam reached Glacier Bay, the far point of our journey, on Friday morning. Steep walls of ice and rock rose from the softly rippling surface all around the ship. It was uncanny standing there, drenched in sunshine, surrounded by all that frozen water. Chunks of it bobbed on the slow current – ice soup. Thankfully, the captain shut off the engines. Except for the scientific litany delivered by a park ranger over the ship's loudspeakers, it was suddenly very quiet.

We floated past Margerie Glacier, Lamplugh Glacier, and Grand Pacific Glacier, which spilled down from the mountains in front of us like a white road. The boat passed so close it felt like you could reach over the railing and sink your fingers in the snow.

Suddenly, a huge shelf of ice detached itself and plunged into the water below – glacial calving hastened by the sun and the warm air. Because it was so much bigger and farther away than it looked, the ice seemed to be falling in slow motion. Velvet-edged thunder swept over the deck. The landscape was maturing in front of our eyes – the earth visibly alive, even restless.

We drifted like that for a couple of hours. Then the ship's engines rumbled again and we pivoted south. On our way out of Glacier Bay, someone spotted a bear walking near some rocks on shore. The ranger told everyone to watch for it, but it vanished behind a cliff. Some of the geeks had the notion to start a rumor that they saw a bald eagle in a nest, feeding its chicks. Soon, other passengers on deck could "see" it too.

Just another trivial hack.

The last scheduled event on the cruise was a Q&A session with Larry. The geeks sat in a half circle around the hacker whose greatest achievement was crafting the tool that enabled them to write themselves into each other's lives.

Uri Guttman, a burly leader of the Perl Mongers who is in the habit of speaking his mind, asked Larry what keeps him up at night. Larry addressed the awkward rift in Perl's holy trinity that many of the geeks had been whispering about all week. "What pains me is seeing two friends of mine disliking one another so much, and unable to find a way to get along," he said.

Responding to a question about Microsoft, Larry compared Perl to Merry Brandybuck in Lord of the Rings, the brave hobbit who slips in unnoticed behind the Lord of the Nazgûl – the mightiest of evil Sauron's servants – and stabs him in the leg. This prevents him from murdering Éowyn, who then kills the black Lord herself.

He quoted what Merry says near the end of the book, after having survived the battle: "It's not always a misfortune being overlooked."

A week after we returned to Vancouver, I visited Larry and Gloria in Silicon Valley.

The Wall household is a marvel of networked chaos. Pyramids of toys and books teeter in the hallways. There are so many computers running – Linux boxes, a Solaris, an NT machine, and several Amigas – that Larry keeps the air conditioning on all the time. He hates being a slave to the phone, so he wrote a Perl script that IDs each caller with a distinctive ring. Another program sounds a chime throughout the house when the family laundry is dry.

Larry has a knack for coining aphorisms such as "The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your résumé by a word and a comma," but he seemed a bit foggy until Gloria plopped down beside him on the couch. Together, they're a happy example of what psychologists call transactive memory. In the middle of a story, Larry will pause to ask Gloria, "How did I feel about so-and-so?" "You liked him!" she'll reply, with characteristic ebullience. There's a network interface built right into the core of Larry's thought process.

I asked them about the rift in the holy trinity. "Tom is a prestige-achieved person, and Randal is a prestige-ascribed person," Gloria observed. "Randal knows how to be nice to people and make people feel heard. You need both to make society work."

Calling him "an idealist, one of the people who must drive things forward," Larry said that Tom served effectively as "the sergeant at arms that I needed, while Randal is in touch with the common man." ("It makes Larry sick to tell people that they can't do something," Gloria added.) The first Camel Book, Larry explained, wouldn't have been written without Randal. Most of the writing in the book is his own, Larry admitted, but he might never have thought of writing it himself.

As a proud command-line hacker, Tom shuns the Web as a sideshow of distractions and noise, but Randal is willing to embrace it as a popular medium. Larry said that in designing a language that allows for more than one way to do things, he intended to attract a culture around Perl with a wide enough range to accommodate the strengths of many different types of programmers.

Asked about Microsoft at the last scheduled event on the cruise, Perl inventor Larry Wall says, "It's not always a misfortune being overlooked."

We talked about Tolkien, who wrote in a letter to a publisher that the artist must resist the temptation to use creative power "with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills." Like Tolkien, Perl's inventor believes that supreme acts of the imagination pay tribute to the ingenuity of the creator of the universe.

"It is our nature to be creative. We can't help it. There is an artistic goodness in the substance of creation," Larry mused. An open source culture in which "each facet of refracted glory is trying to pass the goodness along," he added, "is the structure of Heaven."

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