Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. It was originally developed by Larry Wall as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier, over a period with support from open source community, it has evolved and matured to be used for graphics programming, system administration, network programming, finance, bioinformatics, and other engineering applications.
Source: Wikipedia.
Perl is a general-purpose programming language originally developed for text manipulation, but as of 2010 is used for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming, games, bioinformatics, and GUI development. The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). Its major features include support for multiple programming paradigms (procedural, object-oriented, and functional styles), reference counting memory management (without a cycle-detecting garbage collector), built-in support for text processing, and a large collection of third-party modules. According to Larry Wall, Perl has two slogans. The first is "There's more than one way to do it", commonly known as TMTOWTDI. The second slogan is "Easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible".
Perl is known as one of "the three Ps" (along with Python and PHP), the most popular dynamic languages for writing Web applications. It is also an integral component of the popular LAMP solution stack for web development. Large projects written in Perl include cPanel, Slash, Bugzilla, RT, TWiki, and Movable Type. Many high-traffic websites use Perl extensively. Examples include Amazon.com, bbc.co.uk, Priceline.com, Craigslist,IMDb, LiveJournal, Slashdot and Ticketmaster. Perl is often used as a glue language, tying together systems and interfaces that were not specifically designed to interoperate, and for "data munging",that is, converting or processing large amounts of data for tasks such as creating reports. In fact, these strengths are intimately linked. The combination makes Perl a popular all-purpose language for system administrators, particularly because short programs can be entered and run on a single command line. More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl
