Origin Of Perl

Back in 1986, Larry Wall found himself working on a task which involved generating reports from a lot of text files with cross references.Larry Wall developed Perl in 1986. He was a systems programmer on a project that was developing multilevel, secure wide area networks. Larry was in charge of an installation consisting of three Vaxes and three Suns on the West Coast of the United States connected over an encrypted serial line (1200 baud!) to a similar configuration on the East Coast of the United States. Larry's primary job was system support "guru." During this stint, he developed several useful UNIX tools such as rn, patch, and warp.

Perl was developed in response to a management requirement for a configuration management and control system for all six Vaxes and all six Suns. As with most management requests, Larry had a month to develop this tool!

Being a UNIX programmer, and because the problem involved manipulating the contents of text files, he started touse awk for the task. But it soon became clear that awk wasn't fitting the job; with no other option for the job, he'd just have to write some code.

Instead of wasting time on utility tool, he invented a new language and wrote an interpreter for it.The new language had an emphasis on system management and text handling. After a few revisions, it could handle regular expressions, signals, and network sockets, too. It became known as Perl and quickly became popular with frustrated, lazy UNIX programmers.

Perl is short for "Practical Extraction and Report Language", although it has also been called a "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister." There's no point in arguing which one is more correct, because both are endorsed by Larry Wall, Perl's creator and chief architect, implementor, and maintainer

Larry moved on to support research and development and took Perl with him. Perl was becoming a good tool for system administration. Larry borrowed Henry Spencer's regular expression package and modified it for Perl. Then Larry added most of the goodies he and other people wanted and released it on the Internet.