perl - The Perl 5 language interpreter
Perl officially stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language,
except when it doesn’t.
Perl was originally a language optimized for scanning arbitrary
text files, extracting information from those text files, and
printing reports based on that information. It quickly became a
good language for many system management tasks. Over the years,
Perl has grown into a general-purpose programming language. It’s
widely used for everything from quick “one-liners” to full-scale
application development.
The Perl motto is “There’s more than one way to do it.” Divining
how many more is left as an exercise to the reader.
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
Details:
- Why does OpenBSD still include Perl in its base installation?
- perl(1) - OpenBSD manual pages
- perlintro(1) - OpenBSD manual pages, a brief introduction and overview of Perl
- Created by Larry Wall