Languages

Perl

Scripting Language

Citation Formats

General Reference

Computing Atlas. "Perl." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://computing.interactiveatlas.org/languages/perl.

APA Style

Computing Atlas. (n.d.). Perl. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://computing.interactiveatlas.org/languages/perl

BibTeX

@misc{computingatlas-perl,
  author = {Computing Atlas},
  title = {Perl},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://computing.interactiveatlas.org/languages/perl},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted programming language created by Larry Wall, who began work on it in 1987 while employed as a programmer at Unisys and released version 1.0 on December 18, 1987, as a general-purpose Unix scripting language meant to make report processing easier. Perl's powerful built-in text and regular-expression handling made it a natural fit for early World Wide Web development in the 1990s, particularly for CGI scripts, and it became widely nicknamed the duct tape of the Internet for the role it played gluing together early web services.

Facts

First Released

1987 1

Paradigm

Multi-paradigm: procedural, imperative and functional scripting 1

Significance

Perl has long been known as the duct tape of the Internet, and many large web based applications were written solely in Perl during the 1990s and 2000s; it runs on over one hundred platforms, from portables to mainframes, and remains suited to both rapid prototyping and large scale development. Its design philosophy, that easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible, shaped a generation of scripting languages that followed it. 2

Cross-Tradition Connections