Short for Practical Extraction and Report Language, Perl was released in 1987 by Larry Wall, who developed the language while working for the National Security Agency. Larry wanted his language to be based on common sense programming techniques and wanted applications developed with Perl to be quickly and easily written. Perl was built originally as a simple language to scan text files, extract information from those files, and print reports based on that information. It has blossomed into a full programming language with hundreds of supplemental libraries. Perl is easy to learn and is commonly found on the Internet, used in conjunction with CGI and HTML.
