What Is Perl?

Perl is an interpreted scripting language written in the mid-1980s to help system administrators automate some of their tasks. It has grown from there. It is essentially a procedure-based language, but it does support object orientation.

Because of its power and flexibility, Perl goes by many nicknames: the Swiss Army Chainsaw, bash on steroids, and so on. What is interesting about Perl is that nearly all of its code and syntax is borrowed from other languages. If you're well versed in computer languages, you'll likely see pieces of C, bash, BASIC, awk, and sed reflected in Perl.

You might be surprised at how ubiquitous Perl is on your system. Do a file search for *.pl on your entire system and you are likely to find hundreds of Perl scripts with this extension. Look at the directories these files sit in, and you'll see how critical Perl is to this operating system and its application developers.

There are two guiding principles in the Perl movement: Perl "makes easy things easy, and hard things possible," and There Is More Than One Way To Do It (TIMTOWTDI, also known as the "Tim Toady" principle). Remember these ideas and you will go far.

Note

A grammar note: Perl is an interpreted language whose syntax is run through the perl interpreter. The language is always referred to with a capital P (Perl). The interpreter is always referred to as perl (small P). Thus shall it be here.