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Perl was the internet's first scripting language. Before PHP, before Python, before Node.js, there was Perl — running CGI scripts, processing log files, and doing things with regular expressions that would make your eyes water. Larry Wall designed it as a practical extraction and reporting language, and it became the glue that held the early web together.
The language's motto is "There's More Than One Way To Do It" (TMTOWTDI), which is both its greatest strength and the reason Perl code has a reputation for being write-only. Perl's regular expression integration is unmatched — regexes are a first-class language feature, not a library import. For text processing, log parsing, and system administration, Perl remains formidable.
Perl development has slowed dramatically since Python absorbed most of its use cases. Perl 7 (a cleaned-up Perl 5) was announced and then reconsidered. The language is in maintenance mode for most practical purposes, though major systems (cPanel, Bugzilla, many bioinformatics tools) still depend on it. New projects should probably use Python, but reading Perl remains a valuable skill for maintaining existing systems.