Impatient Perl

The Impatient Introduction to Perl

This document is for people who either want to learn perl or are already programming in perl and just do not have the patience to scrounge for information to learn and use perl. This document should also find use as a handy desk reference for some of the more common perl related questions.

The history of perl in 100 words or less

In the mid-1980s, Larry Wall was working as a sys-admin and found that he needed to do a number of common, yet oddball functions over and over again. And he did not like any of the scripting languages that were around at the time, so he invented Perl. Version 1 was released circa 1987. A few changes have occurred between then and now. The current version of Perl has exceeded 5.8.3 and is a highly recommended upgrade.

Perl 6 is on the drawing board as a fundamental rewrite of the language. It is not available yet, and probably will not be available for some time.

Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. “Perl” refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned “sister language”, Perl 6, before the latter’s name was officially changed to Raku in October 2019.