Perl

The Practical Extraction and Report Language (or the Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister) is a scripting language written by Larry Wall. Perl has it's roots in shell scipting, Awk and C programming.

Perl has been called the "glue that holds the web together". Perl is available for just about every operating system but it particularly prevalent on Unix and Unix-like systems.

Perl is a favorite among system administrators and web developers. Perl is particularly adept at handling text files, regular expressions and quick development times.