The Perl programming language is 25 years old today.

On December 18, 1987, linguist Larry Wall published the first version of the Perl programming language, Perl 1.0.0, in the news group comp.sources.misc.



The name of the language is an abbreviation, which stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language - “a practical language for data extraction and reporting”. Perl was created as a more convenient alternative for sh, awk and sed, but has now grown into something more than just a utility for line-by-line parsing of text flow. Perl is now widely used in system administration, web development, network programming, games, and many other areas.



It is an easy to learn and use language, which is highly efficient, and the main advantages are the support of various programming paradigms, memory control and a large collection of third-party modules. And of course - the ability to solve any problem in several ways.



Over the 25 years of its existence, Perl has steadily increased its influence and popularity. By now, the opinion has spread that around Perl there was "one of the best, if not the best community in the world of Open Source." This is explained by the fact that from the very beginning Perl developed as a “public” project, the members of which helped each other. This tradition has been preserved to this day.

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In the first years (1987-88), the main part of communication on the Internet took place in newsgroups, then the comp.lang.perl conference, which has now become famous, was created. The first participants of that conference, Randall Schwartz (Merlin), Tom Christiansen and others discussed the development of Perl in this conference, and are now known as textbook authors and leaders of Perl consulting companies.



So many community organizations have been created around Perl that it can be difficult for a stranger to understand. The largest of these are The Perl Foundation, the YAPC Europe Foundation and The Enlightened Perl Organization. Perl conferences and workshops are held in St. Petersburg , Kiev , Odessa .



The first Perl book was published by O'Reilly in 1991; it was called “Programming Perl”. The publisher decided to put a camel on the cover of the book as a symbol of the reliability and practicality of the language with a certain ugliness of appearance. The textbook “Camel Book” has acquired the status of the legendary. The community liked the symbol so much that now the camel from that cover became the official Perl logo, and the book has since been reprinted several times.