History

In the early days of UNIX, even simple tasks such as scanning text, extracting strings, and printing reports required the use of more than one program, and, accordingly, the number of people who were interested in learning these skills was limited. Programs such as awk, sed, and grep were hard enough to learn, and matters were made even more complicated by the fact that these programs needed to be tied together with shell scripts. Not only were there several dialects of shell scripts, each with subtle differences, but stringing together several programs in this fashion often proved to be too inefficient for practical use, and the entire task would have to be rewritten in C. In an environment such as this, it's not surprising that even sophisticated users were frustrated, and ordinary users felt that such tasks were well beyond their limits.

In the late 1980's, Larry Wall, then a programmer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, decided that the best features of all the popular programs and shell scripts could be incorporated into a single language. He chose the name perl, partly as an acronym for ``Practical Extraction and Report Language,'' and partly because he just liked the sound of the word. By using constructs that were already familiar to thousands of programmers, he felt that he could create a program which many people could start using with little additional training, since the general ideas already existed in existing programs. By incorporating all of the features in a single language, he could produce a far more efficient solution to problems than was currently available, as well as provide a single, centralized program that would be easier for even ordinary users to master. Although these goals are lofty, most users of Perl agree that they have, at least to a very large extent, been met.