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Perl: /perl/, n. [Practical Extraction and Report Language, a.k.a. Pathologically
Eclectic Rubbish Lister] An interpreted language developed by Larry Wall,
author of
patch(1)
and
rn(1)).
Superficially resembles awk, but is much hairier,
including many facilities reminiscent of
sed(1)
and shells and a comprehensive Unix system-call interface. Unix sysadmins,
who are almost always incorrigible hackers, generally consider it one of
the languages of choice, and it is by far the most
widely used tool for making ‘live’ web pages via CGI. Perl has
been described, in a parody of a famous remark about
lex(1),
as the Swiss-Army chainsaw of Unix programming.
Though Perl is very useful, it would be a stretch to describe it as pretty
or elegant; people who like clean, spare design
generally prefer Python. See also Camel
Book, TMTOWTDI.
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