Perl
/perl/ · noun · Development · Origin: 1987
Definitions
A high-level, dynamically typed scripting language created by Larry Wall in 1987 for text processing and report generation, nicknamed the Swiss Army chainsaw. Perl absorbed ideas from C, sed, AWK, and the shell, and its motto, There's more than one way to do it, produced a language that is expressive and famously easy to write in ways others struggle to read. Its first-class regular expressions set the standard that PCRE and most later engines copied. In the 1990s Perl was the dominant language of CGI web programming and system administration, and CPAN, its package archive, was the model for later ecosystems such as PyPI and npm. Its successor project, Perl 6, diverged so far that it was renamed Raku in 2019, while Perl 5 continues to be maintained. Perl remains common in bioinformatics, legacy web infrastructure, and one-liners run from the command line.
In plain English: An older scripting language famous for text processing and early websites, known for being powerful but hard to read.
Example: That Perl one-liner does in 30 characters what would take 50 lines of Java — and nobody will ever be able to read it again.
Origin Story
The duct tape of the internet started as a report-extraction tool
Larry Wall created Perl in 1987 while working at Unisys. He needed to generate reports from a Usenet-like news system and found that neither sed, awk, nor shell scripting was up to the task. He originally named it **Pearl**, after the Parable of the Pearl from the Gospel of Matthew.
Before the release, Wall discovered an existing language called PEARL and dropped the 'a'. The name was retroactively turned into the backronym **Practical Extraction and Reporting Language**, though Wall also joked it stood for "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister."
Perl became the backbone of early web development through CGI scripts. Its powerful regular expression support and text-processing capabilities earned it the nickname "the duct tape of the internet" -- not elegant, but it held everything together.
Coined by: Larry Wall
Context: Unisys, 1987
Fun fact: Larry Wall is a trained linguist who studied at UC Berkeley and was working on a natural language for the Tagalog Bible translation. Perl's syntax reflects his belief that programming languages should work like natural languages, with multiple ways to say the same thing.