Perl

From Hackers-IL

Perl is a high-level interpreted language originally created by Larry Wall with help from many volunteers. It is many times referred as one of the Scripting Languages but this term is very misleading, because one can write very serious applications large-scale in it and other languages of similar capabilities. A more modern term is "Agile Languages".

Perl is actively used for text processing, server-side-scripting (a.k.a CGI Programming), bio-informatics, testing and Quality Assurance, system administration tasks, graphical user-interface design, graphics (see the ImageMagick or the GIMP bindings), and many other tasks. Some statistics claim it is the language with the third largest amount of programmers in the world today.

The jewel of the crown in the Perl world is CPAN, short for the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. CPAN is a very large repository of useful, re-usable and open-source Perl modules, all of which can be installed in one command (including all of their dependencies). This is not as much as a technical achievement as a community one. CPAN still accounts for the fact that many people stay with Perl, even after being acquainted to other languages.

Partially due to its popularity, Perl has been the target of much criticism from people who favour other languages. Some of them were directed at its complex syntax, and the fact that it uses many emblems. (many Perl enthusiasts will claim it is not a bug but a feature). Some claim Perl code is hard to understand, or even that Perl does not scale to large codebase sizes. (despite the fact experience has often proved otherwise) Some claim Perl lacks commercial support and so cannot be relied on. And there are much more exotic claims.

Despite all that, Perl sports a community of enthusiastic developers - many of whom positively love it.