Perl is a scripting language which borrows much of its syntax from command-line interfaces such as the Bourne shell. It was one of the first programming languages to become really popular for backend web development.

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Things written in Perl

Compilers targeting Perl


Perl is what happens when you play Katamari Damacy with the Unix toolchain.

Ah, but the world should thank Perl for being the experiment that demonstrated the effect of designing a programming language around natural-language principles (because for some reason, we learned so little from COBOL.) And of course we should thank the experimenters for being so candid and unbiased about their results. Finally, we have data that shows us what we already knew, namely that programming, no, "scripting" is really a fuzzy endeavour — much like talking, or thinking. This is why Perl scripts, and by extension all computer programs, have so few bugs.

But if you can psychologically overcome all of that — perhaps with the aid of some sort of nuclear-powered ninja weaponry — Perl's not that bad. Unlike C++, it has garbage collection. It has anonymous function closures (unlike PHP,) and they can consist of more than one expression (unlike Python.) And things like use strict at least smell like an attempt to approach some sort of trying to permit, I don't know, enforcing discipline, or something, if you think that would help.