Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages: Perl 5 and Raku (formerly Perl 6). Created by Larry Wall in 1987, Perl earned the nickname “the swiss-army chainsaw of scripting languages” for its versatility.
Perl 5 powers system administration scripts, text processing pipelines, web applications, bioinformatics tools, and countless production systems — backed by CPAN, the world’s largest and oldest cohesive software archive.
The original swiss-army chainsaw. Text processing, system administration, web — Perl does it all.
✨ Features
World's largest curated module archive. Tens of thousands of battle-tested libraries.
Most expressive regex in any language. Named captures, lookarounds, recursion, conditionals.
"There Is More Than One Way To Do It." Express the same logic in the style that fits.
Scripts written in 2002 still run. Decades of production stability without breakage.
Modern object system on CPAN. Attributes, roles, builders, type constraints — Ruby-class OO.
