Perl History

Perl was developed by Larry Wall in the 1980’s. He was an administrator at NASA and wanted to simplify report processing. Since its development, its role has been developed to include: automating system administration; providing a link between different computer systems; and, has remained a starting point for CGI programming.
Perl grew in popularity because of its easy to understand language while being very powerful. Growing from being a text manipulation language to being now a full fledge language. Being an interpretive language, the scripts will run on any system that can run Perl without any major modifications.
It has been very popular in the Unix community because of the feature set, but has also become popular in non-Unix usages, such as Windows, VMS, Mac, DOS and OS/2. This program runs easily without many modifications in various platforms.

Perl Benefits

Perl is free by download and is usable worldwide
Versatile language that is easy to use. Perl provides a system that requires less coding effort than other programs.
Perl has complete operating system access
Perl works with a variety of platforms, including Unix and non-Unix systems
Advanced language features
Fast
Secure
Free Code
Implements an embeddable scripting language
Perl is constantly upgradable