A long time ago, a young man named Larry Wall wanted to be a translator for Wycliffe Bible translators. Somehow he ended up at NASA's Jet Propulsion Labratory (JPL) as a programmer. In the course of his duties, he needed a report-generator language. At the time, the de facto standard in the UNIX toolkit was AWK. AWK had some limitations, so Larry set out to write his own Practical Extraction and Reporting Language: PERL. Version 1 was released in 1987. It was fairly useful even then. I remember giving a talk to AUUG about free software shortly thereafter and making the comment "If AWK is the Unix Swiss army knife, then Perl is a Swiss army chainsaw." Perl had its adherants by 1990, mostly doing UNIX SysAdmin kind of work. Larry Wall refers to Perl as the first 'postmodern' programming language. Its motto is "there's more than one way to do anything." 

Then in the mid-1990's the Web hit. HTML was cool. But out-of-the-box webservers couldn't handle form submissions. One had to have a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) program to accept form input and do something with it: enter it into a guestbook, store it in a database, or maybe even do e-commerce. CGI programs can be written in any language you please. A friend of mine even wrote one in COBOL just to show it could be done. C was fast, but really too much work. Cold Fusion came along, but it was pricey. Java was ok, but complex. Lo and behold, Perl was very nearly a perfect language to do CGI programming in. Interest in Perl was rekindled by the web crowd as new, cool ways to do CGI with perl came around. 

Notice I said 'very nearly' perfect. A dialect of Perl became PHP, which was even better suited to web work, then PHP left its Perl roots and became its own language.  Perl is open-source, but not licensedunder the usual Gnu Public License (GPL) as Linux is. It uses a license of Larry's own creation called the "Artistic License". Yes, the pun was very much intended.

 Larry Wall left JPL  and now works for O'Reilly publishing. Perl development continues apace. The current version is 5.10.0, with the major revision of Perl 6 making inroads. The O'Reilly books about Perl generally have a Camel motif on the cover.

Locally the Atlanta Perl Mongers meet monthly at Cox communications. They were without a regular meeting venue for a bit last year, leading to lame jokes about nomadic camels (these lame jokes were mostly mine). One of the highlights of the past year was a talk by Randal Schwartz. Randal is the co-author of O'Reilly's "Learning Perl" and "Intermediate Perl" books. Randal was in town to speak at DragonCon. (How do I get a gig like that?!?) Apparently a good time was had by all.

Is Perl ready for prime-time? Absolutely!! In fact, I was amused to recently hear one technical recruiter in the area refer to Perl as "legacy software". How time flies!! People are still doing new production systems in Perl. We'll look at one of them next time.