Larry Wall created Perl in 1987 as a glue language for Unix system administration, drawing inspiration from C, sed, awk, shell, and what appears to have been a thesaurus dropped into a blender. Perl’s motto — “there’s more than one way to do it” — is either liberating or terrifying depending on how recently you’ve tried to read someone else’s Perl. The language powered CGI scripts across the early web, built CPAN into one of the richest module ecosystems in computing, and produced code that was frequently correct, occasionally brilliant, and almost never readable by its author six months later. Perl 6 was announced in 2000, took nineteen years to reach a stable release, and was eventually renamed Raku to avoid further confusion. Perl 5, meanwhile, soldiers on.
