[ Thanks to Greta
Durr/LinuxMall.com for this link. ]
“Perl is currently maintained by a core group of about 100
programmers through a central mailing list. Wall maintains artistic
control, but independent programmers have come up with more than
600 add-on modules to date. Called the “duct tape of the Internet”
because it pulls together so many different processes, Perl is one
of the most popular Web programming languages and contains a common
gateway interface script perl miscellaneous (CGI.pm) module that
makes handling HTML forms easy. Amazon.com and Deja.com use Perl to
run their high-volume sites.”
“Perl’s inventor, Larry Wall, was a UNIX programmer who attended
college at Seattle Pacific University and did graduate work at the
University of California’s Los Angeles and Berkeley campuses. Wall
also has written some popular free programs for UNIX and is the
author of metaconfig, a program that writes Configure scripts.
Three years after Perl’s debut in 1986, Wall distributed Perl
version 3.000 under the terms of the GNU General Public License
(GPL) for the first time in 1989. “
“Then the great Manager asked him to produce reports. News was
maintained in separate files on a master machine, with lots of
cross references between files. Larry’s first thought was `Let’s
use awk.’ Unfortunately, the awk of that day couldn’t handle
opening and closing of multiple files based on information in the
files. Larry didn’t want to have to code a special-purpose tool. As
a result, a new language was born.”