What exactly is PERL? I know it’s a programming language, but what is it good for?
“Practical Extration and Reporting Language” … they used to call it “The Duct Tape of the Internet” in the early days. It is very strong in text processing. It was designed that you could write code that could be read in an “English-Like Grammar”… You can also write absolutely AWFUL looking code with it! They used to have “The Obfuscated Perl Contest” every year for the ugliest code. I swear I saw this (though I can’t find it now), someone wrote functional code that looked like the Mona Lisa in ASCII art!
You can write very powerful code in far fewer lines of code than C, C++, Java, or other higher level languages. Regular Expressions are especially easy to use in Perl, and they take a central place in the language.
PERL used to sometimes be called a “Write Once, Read Never” language because of its inscrutability!