Summary: in this tutorial, you’ll learn about the Perl programming language including language features, versions, and the inventor.
Powerful, stable, portable, and mature, Perl is one of the most feature-rich programming languages with over two decades of development.
Perl is portable and cross-platform. At the time of this writing, Perl can run on over 100 platforms.
Perl is good for mission-critical large-scale projects as well as rapid prototyping.
Perl features
1) High-quality
Perl is used for mission-critical projects because of its high quality. According to the Coverity analysis, Perl’s core has been certified free of security flaws and has low defect density.
2) Perl is extendable
Perl has more than hundreds of thousands of open-source modules on the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN).
These modules provide many powerful extensions to the standard library e.g., XML processing, graphical user interfaces, and database integrations.
Perl supports major database management systems including Oracle, Sybase, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and many more.
3) Perl is an easy-to-use language
Perl is intended to be efficient and complete rather than elegant and minimal.
Perl supports some major programming paradigms including object-oriented, procedural, and functional.
One of the most remarkable features of Perl is text manipulation. Perl comes with a set of powerful APIs for processing text that makes it perfect for working with XML, HTML, and other markup languages.
A key feature of text manipulation in Perl is the regular expression engine. This is the reason why Perl is popular for both command-line tools and web applications.
4) Perl is an open-source project
Perl is an open-source project developed and evolving by an active community of programmers and professionals who really use it.
You can use and distribute Perl freely under the term of Artistic License or GNU, GPL Licenses. Perl’s commercial support services are also available.
Perl versions
The latest stable version of Perl is 5.32. We’re going to use Perl 5.32 for our tutorials.
Perl 6 is a very different language that is the fully object-oriented reimplementation of Perl 5. Perl 6 was released in Jan 2016.
Perl inventor
Larry Wall invented Perl in 1987 when he was a linguist, working as a system administrator at NASA. The beginning intention of Perl was a general-purpose scripting language in UNIX to process reports easier and faster.
Since then, Perl has been evolving with a lot of improvements and innovations to make it become popular among developers and professionals.
