Randal L. Schwartz (born November 22, 1961), also known as merlyn, is an American author, system administrator and programming consultant. 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. 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. Schwartz is currently a co-host on FLOSS Weekly, a free software/open source (FLOSS) themed 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. Since 1985, Schwartz has owned and operated Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. <a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Randal+Schwartz">Read more on Last.fm</a>. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.