Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier.
Indeed, Wall claims that the name was intended to inspire many different expansions. == History == ===Early versions=== Larry Wall began work on Perl in 1987, while working as a programmer at Unisys, and released version 1.0 to the comp.sources.misc newsgroup on December 18, 1987.
The language expanded rapidly over the next few years. Perl 2, released in 1988, featured a better regular expression engine.
Perl 3, released in 1989, added support for binary data streams. Originally, the only documentation for Perl was a single lengthy man page.
Perl 5 gained widespread popularity in the late 1990s as a CGI scripting language, in part due to its unsurpassed regular expression and string parsing abilities. In addition to CGI, Perl 5 is used for system administration, network programming, finance, bioinformatics, and other applications, such as for GUIs.
A Perl Golf Apocalypse was held at Perl Conference 4.0 in Monterey, California in July 2000. Obfuscation As with C, obfuscated code competitions were a well known pastime in the late 1990s.
In 1991, Programming Perl, known to many Perl programmers as the "Camel Book" because of its cover, was published and became the de facto reference for the language.
At the same time, the Perl version number was bumped to 4, not to mark a major change in the language but to identify the version that was well documented by the book. === Early Perl 5 === Perl 4 went through a series of maintenance releases, culminating in Perl 4.036 in 1993, whereupon Wall abandoned Perl 4 to begin work on Perl 5.
Initial design of Perl 5 continued into 1994.
The perl5-porters mailing list was established in May 1994 to coordinate work on porting Perl 5 to different platforms.
It remains the primary forum for development, maintenance, and porting of Perl 5. Perl 5.000 was released on October 17, 1994.
Perl 5 has been in active development since then. Perl 5.001 was released on March 13, 1995.
Perl 5.002 was released on February 29, 1996 with the new prototypes feature.
Perl 5.003 was released June 25, 1996, as a security release. One of the most important events in Perl 5 history took place outside of the language proper and was a consequence of its module support.
The Obfuscated Perl Contest was a competition held by The Perl Journal from 1996 to 2000 that made an arch virtue of Perl's syntactic flexibility.
In 1998, it was also referred to as the "duct tape that holds the Internet together," in reference to both its ubiquitous use as a glue language and its perceived inelegance. Perl is a highly expressive programming language: source code for a given algorithm can be short and highly compressible. == Name == Perl was originally named "Pearl".
Another significant development was the inclusion of the CGI.pm module, which contributed to Perl's popularity as a CGI scripting language. Perl 5.004 also added support for Microsoft Windows and several other operating systems. Perl 5.005 was released on July 22, 1998.
"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. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language".
Raku, which began as a redesign of Perl 5 in 2000, eventually evolved into a separate language.
This release included several enhancements to the regex engine, new hooks into the backend through the B::* modules, the qr// regex quote operator, a large selection of other new core modules, and added support for several more operating systems, including BeOS. ===2000–2020=== Perl 5.6 was released on March 22, 2000.
When developing Perl 5.6, the decision was made to switch the versioning scheme to one more similar to other open source projects; after 5.005_63, the next version became 5.5.640, with plans for development versions to have odd numbers and stable versions to have even numbers. In 2000, Wall put forth a call for suggestions for a new version of Perl from the community.
Perl 5 development versions are released on a monthly basis, with major releases coming out once per year. The relative proportion of Internet searches for "Perl programming", as compared with similar searches for other programming languages, steadily declined from about 10% in 2005 to about 2% in 2011, to about 0.7% in 2020. ==Raku (Perl 6)== At the 2000 Perl Conference, Jon Orwant made a case for a major new language-initiative.
A Perl Golf Apocalypse was held at Perl Conference 4.0 in Monterey, California in July 2000. Obfuscation As with C, obfuscated code competitions were a well known pastime in the late 1990s.
The Obfuscated Perl Contest was a competition held by The Perl Journal from 1996 to 2000 that made an arch virtue of Perl's syntactic flexibility.
In 2001, work began on the "Apocalypses" for Perl 6, a series of documents meant to summarize the change requests and present the design of the next generation of Perl.
In 2001, it was decided that Perl 6 would run on a cross-language virtual machine called Parrot.
At this point, Perl 6 existed only as a description of a language. Perl 5.8 was first released on July 18, 2002, and had nearly yearly updates since then.
A VBScript-to-Perl converter, as well as a Perl compiler for Windows, and converters of awk and sed to Perl have also been produced by this company and included on the ActiveState CD for Windows, which includes all of their distributions plus the Komodo IDE and all but the first on the Unix/Linux/Posix variant thereof in 2002 and subsequently. Strawberry Perl is an open-source distribution for Windows.
The PONIE Project existed from 2003 until 2006 and was to be a bridge between Perl 5 and Perl 6.
As of 2013 this version still remains the most popular version of Perl and is used by Red Hat 5, Suse 10, Solaris 10, HP-UX 11.31 and AIX 5. In 2004, work began on the "Synopses"documents that originally summarized the Apocalypses, but which became the specification for the Perl 6 language.
In February 2005, Audrey Tang began work on Pugs, a Perl 6 interpreter written in Haskell.
In a talk at the YAPC::Europe 2005 conference and subsequent article "A Timely Start," Jean-Louis Leroy found that his Perl programs took much longer to run than expected because the perl interpreter spent significant time finding modules within his over-large include path.
Perl 5 development versions are released on a monthly basis, with major releases coming out once per year. The relative proportion of Internet searches for "Perl programming", as compared with similar searches for other programming languages, steadily declined from about 10% in 2005 to about 2% in 2011, to about 0.7% in 2020. ==Raku (Perl 6)== At the 2000 Perl Conference, Jon Orwant made a case for a major new language-initiative.
This will mean that other languages targeting the Parrot will gain native access to CPAN, allowing some level of cross-language development. In 2005, Audrey Tang created the Pugs project, an implementation of Perl 6 in Haskell.
This effort stalled in 2006. PONIE is an acronym for Perl On New Internal Engine.
The PONIE Project existed from 2003 until 2006 and was to be a bridge between Perl 5 and Perl 6.
The goal was to ensure the future of the millions of lines of Perl 5 code at thousands of companies around the world. The PONIE project ended in 2006 and is no longer being actively developed.
Some of the improvements made to the Perl 5 interpreter as part of PONIE were folded into that project. On December 18, 2007, the 20th anniversary of Perl 1.0, Perl 5.10.0 was released.
It has had regular, quarterly releases since January 2008, including new modules as feedback and requests come in.
As of November 2009, Rakudo Perl has had regular monthly releases and now is the most complete implementation of Perl 6. A major change in the development process of Perl 5 occurred with Perl 5.11; the development community has switched to a monthly release cycle of development releases, with a yearly schedule of stable releases.
By that plan, bugfix point releases will follow the stable releases every three months. On April 12, 2010, Perl 5.12.0 was released.
The analogue of the raptor comes from a series of talks given by Matt S Trout beginning in 2010.
Perl 5.12.0 was released in April 2010 with some new features influenced by the design of Perl 6, followed by Perl 5.14.1 (released on June 17, 2011), Perl 5.16.1 (released on August 9, 2012.), and Perl 5.18.0 (released on May 18, 2013).
On January 21, 2011, Perl 5.12.3 was released; it contains updated modules and some documentation changes.
Version 5.12.4 was released on June 20, 2011.
The latest version of that branch, 5.12.5, was released on November 10, 2012. On May 14, 2011, Perl 5.14 was released.
Perl 5.12.0 was released in April 2010 with some new features influenced by the design of Perl 6, followed by Perl 5.14.1 (released on June 17, 2011), Perl 5.16.1 (released on August 9, 2012.), and Perl 5.18.0 (released on May 18, 2013).
Perl 5 development versions are released on a monthly basis, with major releases coming out once per year. The relative proportion of Internet searches for "Perl programming", as compared with similar searches for other programming languages, steadily declined from about 10% in 2005 to about 2% in 2011, to about 0.7% in 2020. ==Raku (Perl 6)== At the 2000 Perl Conference, Jon Orwant made a case for a major new language-initiative.
The latest version of that branch, 5.12.5, was released on November 10, 2012. On May 14, 2011, Perl 5.14 was released.
The latest version of that branch, 5.14.4, was released on March 10, 2013. On May 20, 2012, Perl 5.16 was released.
Perl 5.12.0 was released in April 2010 with some new features influenced by the design of Perl 6, followed by Perl 5.14.1 (released on June 17, 2011), Perl 5.16.1 (released on August 9, 2012.), and Perl 5.18.0 (released on May 18, 2013).
In a December 2012 blog posting, despite claiming that "Rakudo Perl 6 has failed and will continue to fail unless it gets some adult supervision", chromatic stated that the design of Perl 6 has a "well-defined grammar" as well as an "improved type system, a unified object system with an intelligent metamodel, metaoperators, and a clearer system of context that provides for such niceties as pervasive laziness".
As of 2013 this version still remains the most popular version of Perl and is used by Red Hat 5, Suse 10, Solaris 10, HP-UX 11.31 and AIX 5. In 2004, work began on the "Synopses"documents that originally summarized the Apocalypses, but which became the specification for the Perl 6 language.
The latest version of that branch, 5.14.4, was released on March 10, 2013. On May 20, 2012, Perl 5.16 was released.
Perl 5.16 also updates the core to support Unicode 6.1. On May 18, 2013, Perl 5.18 was released.
Perl 5.12.0 was released in April 2010 with some new features influenced by the design of Perl 6, followed by Perl 5.14.1 (released on June 17, 2011), Perl 5.16.1 (released on August 9, 2012.), and Perl 5.18.0 (released on May 18, 2013).
Notable new features include the new dtrace hooks, lexical subs, more CORE:: subs, overhaul of the hash for security reasons, support for Unicode 6.2. On May 27, 2014, Perl 5.20 was released.
"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. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language".
Perl 5 development versions are released on a monthly basis, with major releases coming out once per year. The relative proportion of Internet searches for "Perl programming", as compared with similar searches for other programming languages, steadily declined from about 10% in 2005 to about 2% in 2011, to about 0.7% in 2020. ==Raku (Perl 6)== At the 2000 Perl Conference, Jon Orwant made a case for a major new language-initiative.
Perl 7 was to initially be based on Perl 5.32 with a release expected in first half of 2021, and release candidates sooner. This plan was revised in May 2021, without any release timeframe or version of Perl 5 for use as a baseline specified.
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