Perl | Definition, History, & Facts | Britannica (original) (raw)

Perl, a cross-platform open-source computer programming language used widely in the commercial and private computing sectors. Perl was a favourite in the late 20th and early 21st centuries among Web developers for its flexible, continually evolving text-processing and problem-solving capabilities.

In December 1987 American programmer and linguist Larry Wall first released Perl 1.0 for computers running the UNIX operating system. This first version was an intuitive, easily coded language for scanning, extracting, and printing information from text files; in addition, Perl could handle many system management tasks. Perl, which has sometimes been said to stand for “practical extraction and report language,” was influenced by existing programming languages—such as C, BASIC, and AWK—but it also reflected Wall’s linguistic background in its extensive use of common English words. Perl was a landmark product in advocating the open-source model—a collaborative, rather than proprietary, approach to software development—earning Wall the 1996 Dr. Dobb’s Excellence in Programming Award and the Free Software Foundation’s Award for the Advancement of Free Software in 1998.

Several print resources and online user groups emerged to connect Perl developers and users, and an extensive subculture evolved alongside the language. Part of Perl’s appeal was that a myriad of different codes could be used to obtain the same objective. Among devoted Perl followers, this flexibility prompted obfuscation coding contests, Perl golf competitions to write the shortest possible code for a desired function, and Perl-language poetry collections. The official symbol of the Perl language and community is a coin-shaped logo of a camel head, bearing the text “Programming Republic of Perl.” The symbol was popularized after the release in 1991 of Programming Perl, the official programming manual for Perl 4, which was written by Wall and Randal Schwartz and featured a camel as the cover illustration. The program was substantially rewritten by Wall and was released as Perl 5 in 1994; it continues to receive support and revisions from the Perl community. Perl 6 was released in 2015 and later renamed Raku in 2019.

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Perl was ported to non-UNIX operating systems, such as Apple Inc.’s Mac OS and Microsoft Corporation’s Windows OS, during the 1990s, though it remained more popular in the UNIX community. In the early 21st century Perl was supplanted in popularity by Python.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Augustyn.