1.2. A brief history of Perl

Perl was introduced in 1987 (4 years before Linux itself), when the author, Larry Wall, released version 1.000 of it. The reason for its creation was that Wall was unhappy by the functionality that sed, C, awk and the Bourne Shell offered him. He looked for a language that will combine all of their best features, while having as few disadvantages of its own.

Since then, perl has seen several versions, each adding additional functionality. perl version 5, which was released in 1994, was a complete re-write of the perl interpreter, and introduced such things as hard references, modules, objects and lexical scoping. Several second-digit versions of perl 5 appeared since then, and the most up-to-date stable version (as of November 2010) is 5.12.x.

Perl became especially popular as a language for writing server-side scripts for web-servers. But that's not the only use of perl, as it is commonly used for system administration tasks, managing database data, as well as writing GUI applications.

Links:

• The Perl Timeline.

• Perl's history on the Perl 5 Wiki.

• The Taming of the Camel - a lecture by Larry Wall about the Evolution of Perl.