Introducing to Perl
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Larry Wall (2007)
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Perl stands for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. Perl is a general-purpose, high level, interpreted and dynamic computer programming language with a vast number of uses. Perl was invented by Larry Wall, a linguist working as a systems administrator at NASA in 1987. From the beginning, Perl was used as a general-purpose UNIX scripting language to help processing reports faster and easier. Since then Perl has undergone a lot of modifications and improvements to become popular among developer community. Even though Perl has far surpassed its first invention, Larry Wall is still developing the core language with the newest version of Perl now is Perl 6.
Today Perl is found in varied applications such as finance, manufacturing, genetics, the military etc to process large data sets. Perl is used to be one of the most popular languages for developing web applications. At that time, Perl is used to write CGI scripts. You can find Perl in large projects such as Bugzilla, movable Type and other high-traffic websites such as Amazon.com, Ebay, LiveJournal and Craigslist.
Perl is very good and optimized for problems that handle 90% of text and 10% of other. Perl is best for short and small programs that can be entered and run on a single command line.
Perl run well on UNIX and Windows systems. If you develop Perl for UNIX system, it can be portable to Windows system as well.