Perl Programming Language
Introduction to Perl
By Mark Ciotola
First published on September 9, 2019. Last updated on February 16, 2020.
Perl is a programming language that is good at processing text. (Some folks might call it a scripting language, but it doesn’t really matter for our purposes). Perl became extremely popular in the early days of the world wide web for writing scripts to make websites do things. Its ability to work with text is one of its chief advantages over other languages.
Perl is both a somewhat flexible and fussy language, unlike some other languages such as Ruby. Perl gives you many ways to do something, yet it can be very particular about some things, especially if you set it to be so. Also, PERL has changed over the years, so some earlier program examples you find might not work with current environments. However, for some tasks, Perl is the right tool for the job, and there is also a lot of legacy code written in Perl.