Perl creator Larry Wall promised version 6 of Perl will be the first truly extensible programming language during his annual "State of the Onion" speech at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON), ...

1987: The first version of the Perl programming language is released. Perl was the brainchild of Larry Wall, a programmer at Unisys, who borrowed from existing languages, especially C, to create a ...

I first heard of Perl when I was in middle school in the early 2000s. It was one of the world’s most versatile programming languages, dubbed the Swiss army knife of the Internet.

It was ranked ninth this time last year as well. It is ranked 15th in this month’s PyPL index, which gauges language popularity based on searches on language tutorials in Google.

Perl is a messy, maddening programming language, the “duct tape of the internet.” But at least you can tell it was made by humans.

Perl.org, which advocates for Perl, cites version 5 of the language as having more than 26 years of development behind it. A member of several Perl Foundation committees disputed Tiobe’s assessment.