Perl
Perl was first introduced in 1987 to provide additional functionality than that offered by contemporary programming languages such as se, C and awk. Consequently, Perl was created to combine all the best features of these programming languages while having as few disadvantages as possible. Since its inception Perl has seen many upgrades, each adding additional functionality. The 1994 re-write of Perl in interpreter introduced such things and modules, references, objects and lexical scooping. Several newer version of Perl have appeared since then.
Perl has become an especially popular programming language for writing server-side scripts for web-servers. But Perl has many other uses as well. It is used for system administration tasks, managing database data, as well as writing GUI applications.
Popular Perl features:
Perl combines the best features from other popular programming languages including but not limited to C, awk, sh, sed and BASIC.
Perl's database integration interface (DBI) supports many third-party databases including Oracle, Postgres, MySQL, Sybase, and others.
Perl is extensible. There are well over 500 third party modules available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN).
Perl works extremely well in combination with HTML, XML, and other mark-up languages.
Perl supports Unicode.
Perl supports both object-oriented and procedural programming.
Perl interfaces with external C/C++ libraries through XS or SWIG.
Perl and the Web:
Perl likely the most widely employed web programming language because of its rapid development cycle and text manipulation capabilities.
Perl's makes handling HTML forms simple.
Perl can work with encrypted Internet data, including e-commerce transactions.
Perl can be embedded into web servers to speed up processing by as much as 20 times.
Mod_perl allows the Apache web server to embed a Perl interpreter.
Perl's database integration interface (DBI) package makes web-database integration easy.
