Perl was originally named "Pearl". Wall wanted to give the language a short name with positive connotations. It is also a Christian reference to the Parable of the Pearl from the Gospel of Matthew. However, Wall … See more

Early versions
Larry Wall began work on Perl in 1987, while employed as a programmer at Unisys; he released version 1.0 on December 18, 1987. … See more

Perl is dual licensed under both the Artistic License 1.0 and the GNU General Public License. Distributions are available for most operating systems. It is particularly prevalent on Unix and Unix-like systems, but it has been ported to most modern (and many obsolete) … See more

Perl has many and varied applications, compounded by the availability of many standard and third-party modules.
Perl has chiefly been … See more

Philosophy
According to Wall, Perl has two slogans. The first is "There's more than one way to do it," commonly … See more

The Computer Language Benchmarks Game compares the performance of implementations of typical programming problems in several programming languages. The submitted Perl implementations typically perform toward the high end of the … See more

Perl's culture and community has developed alongside the language itself. Usenet was the first public venue in which Perl was introduced, … See more