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Languages were first invented by humans, for the benefit of humans. In the annals of computer science, this fact has occasionally been forgotten. Since Perl was designed (loosely speaking) by an occasional linguist, it was designed to work smoothly in the same ways that natural language works smoothly. Naturally, there are many aspects to this, since natural language works well at many levels simultaneously. We could enumerate many of these linguistic principles here, but the most importnat principle of language design is simply that easy things should be easy and, and hard things should be possible. That may seem obvious, but many computer languages fail at one or the other.

--Larry Wall, Programming Perl

Back in the Olde Days of the Internet (about 3 years ago), Perl was the de facto standard for writing server-side programs to create user-specific web pages and HTML applications. These days, Perl has been somewhat eclipsed by Active Server Pages (ASP) and Java Server Pages (JSP) when it comes to writing web applications, but Perl still holds its own whenever you need to do anything that involves manipulating text.

Resources for the Perl enthusiast

• Perl.com is probably the best place to start.
• The Perl Journal sponsors an annual Perl Poetry contest
• Perl Mongers is a not-for-profit Perl advocacy organization.
• CPAN is the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. Comprehensive: the aim is to contain all the Perl material you will need. Archive: 786 megabytes as of July 2000. Network: CPAN is mirrored at more than one hundred sites around the world.
• ActiveState brings Perl to Win32 operating systems
• Perlguy.com is another good web resource, including a few poems written in Perl
• Perltoys.com has a Magnetic Perl Poetry kit for your refrigerator!
• Randall Schwartz, author of Learning Perl