Perl

The Practical Extraction and Report Language (or the Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister) is a scripting language written by Larry Wall. Perl has its roots in shell scripting, 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.

As an example of Perl in action, Wikipedia is our own slightly customized version of CliffordAdams' UseMod Wiki software -- written in Perl, of course.