What is Perl?
With the slogan, “There’s more than one way to do it,” Perl came on the scene as a flexible, powerful server-side language that could do more than one job. And for a number of years, Perl made very important contributions to modern web technology—especially for a language that was developed before the web even came to be.
It’s prominent on the list of back-end programming languages, has an active developer community, and stands out among other server-side scripts as one of the most popular languages used in CGI scripting. But in terms of developer popularity—arguably one of the key barometers of the health and future of a technology—it’s appeared to wane with new learners, falling behind popular languages like Ruby and Python.
Today, Perl is still really prominent—and often makes up the P of the popular LAMP stack (Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl, PHP, or Python). Get to know a little more about this language below.
- Perl is a server-side script. Server-side scripts create the architecture and functionality of a site that you don’t see to help the client-facing part of a website you do see run smoothly and dynamically.
- Perl is free, open-source, and object-oriented.
- It’s cross-platform and lightning fast. It was built to run on the Unix operating system but can run on over 100 platforms. And compared with other scripting languages like Python and Ruby, it runs incredibly fast and performs well handling large amounts of data.
- It interfaces well with C/C++ languages, with major syntax similarities to C and PHP. Unix has a built-in Perl interpreter.
- It supports database integration with almost every possible relational and non-relational database, serving as the “glue” for back-end software. It’s ideal for database mining, as well.
Perl is most often used for:
- System administration
- CGI scripting
- Intrawebs and older web systems
- Data mining and statistical analysis
- GUI programming
- Web automation
- Security system prototyping
- Network prototyping
- Regular expressions in bioinformatics, widely used in the 1990s