The A-Z of Programming Languages: Perl

"Was there a particular problem you were trying to solve?

"You can tell the other problem by the reaction Perl got from the die hards in the Unix community. They said tools should do one thing and do them well. But they didn't understand Perl was not envisioned as a tool so much as a machine shop for writing tools.

"How did the name Perl come about?

"I came up with the name as I wanted something with positive connotations. The name originally had an "a" in it. There was another lab stats language called Pearl, so I added another backronym. The second one is Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.

"Do you ever find yourself using the “backronym” Practical Extraction and Report Language at all?

"It is meant to indicate that there is more than way to do it, so we have multiple backronyms intentionally."

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