Perl Language History

Larry Wall wrote a tool to help maintain a configuration management system that was distributed across both U.S. coasts. After a year of development, Wall released the first version of Perl in 1986, alternately calling it the Practical Extraction and Report Language and the Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister. Other programmers called it the Swiss Army Chainsaw of software.
More than 37 years later, Perl is now in its version 5.27. The popularity and longevitiy of this language is a strong testimony to its usefulness.The Internet is a very pragmatic place and when something works well, it flourishes. Perl is still here, and growing, because it does the job better than anything else.
Perl started life as a 'glue' language allowing one to 'stick' different tools together by converting between their various data formats. It pulled together the best features of several languages:

1. the powerful regular expressions from sed (the UNIX stream editor),
2. the pattern-scanning language awk, and
3. a few other languages and utilities.

The syntax was further made up out of C, Pascal, Basic and UNIX shell languages. Version 1 of Perl was introduced on December 18, 1987, and the language has been steadily developing since then, with contributions from different groups. Perl 2 expanded the regular expression support, while Perl 3 allowed Perl to deal with binary data. Perl 4 was released so that the Camel Book could refer to a new version of Perl. Perl 5 has seen some rather drastic changes in syntax and some pretty fantastic extensions to the language. Perl 5 is backwardly compatible with previous versions of the language, but at the same time, makes a lot of the old code obsolete. Perl 4 code may still run, but Perl 4 style is definitely frowned upon these days. At the time of writing, the current stable release of Perl is 5.6, which is what this book will detail. That said, the maintainers of Perl are very careful to ensure that old code will run, perhaps all the way back to Perl 1, since changes and features that break existing programs are evaluated extremely seriously. Everything you see here will continue to function in the future.

Perl was originally developed to make report processing easier. It has undergone many changes and revisions and the latest version of Perl available to developers is Perl 5.32, which was released in 2020. Perl 6, which began as a redesign of Perl 5 in 2000, eventually evolved into a separate language. Both languages continue to be developed independently by different development teams and both borrow ideas from one another.
They provide powerful text processing facilities without the arbitrary data-length limits of many contemporary Unix commandline tools, facilitating easy manipulation of text files. Perl 5 gained widespread popularity in the late 1990s as a CGI scripting language, in part due to its ability to parse text and expressions. In addition to Common Gateway Interface, Perl 5 is used for

1. graphics programming,
2. system administration,
3. network programming and
4. bioinformatics.

It is nicknamed "the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages" because of its flexibility and power. In 1998, it was also referred to as the "duct tape that holds the Internet together", in reference to its ubiquitous use as a language to glue components together.