Perl

since 1987 (earliest usage recorded on this site was 1985)

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Perl borrows features from other programming languages including C, shell scripting (sh), AWK, and sed. The language provides powerful text processing facilities without the arbitrary data length limits of many contemporary Unix tools, facilitating easy manipulation of text files. It is also used for graphics programming, system administration, network programming, applications that require database access and CGI programming on the Web. Perl is nicknamed "the Swiss Army chainsaw of programming languages" due to its flexibility and adaptability.

more info

Users

Technology Timeline Graph

1985

1986

1987

1988

1989

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

2023

2024

rragan

vangale

joemcmahon

ironfort

dfan

gnat

ndw

liza

bmaxwell

boutell

rrainey

jtauber

AndyC

vitaliyf

growe

dabeaz

takitimu

eMBee

mpirnat

enki

ashugg

jjames

MarkofCain

zeroaltitude

mjhagen

thraxil

kan

hexdump42

kevinpet

supakoo

bob

wilane

daddy

brucehoult

frankwiles

RossP

reed

benjaminws

robhudson

carljm

westonruter

givas

jkocherhans

arowla

streetcleaner

bg4

David

jamesotron

Cema

jcarbaugh

r1chardj0n3s

jbeigel

twhitton

pydanny

adders

nathans

marcelor

cpt_ahag

jeffself

danceswithvowels

eykd

lambacck

bittercoder

sfaruque

tartley

gklein

1stvamp

vvarp

shiny

mfandreas

mowens

larry

thumper

Bunglebogs

davisagli

paltman

daniellindsley

sceptreofjudah

rogerclark

Sitwonade

mwalling

Sitwon

ShawnMilo

drakkos

eddymul

honzakral

CerealBoy

passy

sli

ghoseb

moriogawa

sbastn

asenchi

zellyn

jefftriplett

pmclanahan

cdeblois

davidpaccoud

quakehead

Kanru

floyd

eculver

sjaekel

iamteem

ubersoldat

adamcik

nsmgr8

NX172

bocke

natevw

krisse2

dan

greyfade

binarydud

Swizec

nbprithv

xhae

amackera

sdhamilton

mantovani

Raisapius

joshontheweb

bkonkle

andyrak

thaostra

mallipeddi

timus

gridaphobe

perimosocordiae

MechanisM

CrociDB

rragan - 40 years

vangale - 13 years

joemcmahon - 38 years

ironfort - 35 years

dfan - 9 years

gnat - 33 years

ndw - 33 years

liza - 9 years

bmaxwell - 32 years

boutell - 12 years

af - 5 years

rrainey - 31 years

jtauber - 5 years

AndyC - 2 years

vitaliyf - 6 years

growe - 30 years

dabeaz - 30 years

takitimu - 30 years

eMBee - 3 years

mpirnat - 6 years

enki - 8 years

ashugg - 30 years

jjames - 30 years

MarkofCain - 30 years

zeroaltitude - 30 years

mjhagen - 3 years

thraxil - 29 years

kan - 1 years

hexdump42 - 2 years

kevinpet - 12 years

supakoo - 29 years

bob - 29 years

wilane - 29 years

daddy - 29 years

brucehoult - 28 years

frankwiles - 14 years

RossP - 4 years

reed - 28 years

dl - 28 years

benjaminws - 27 years

robhudson - 4 years

carljm - 6 years

westonruter - 27 years

givas - 3 years

jkocherhans - 2 years

arowla - 12 years

streetcleaner - 4 years

bg4 - 27 years

David - 27 years

jamesotron - 3 years

Cema - 27 years

jcarbaugh - 4 years

r1chardj0n3s - 3 years

jbeigel - 4 years

twhitton - 26 years

pydanny - 1 years

adders - 26 years

nathans - 25 years

marcelor - 5 years

cpt_ahag - 8 years

jeffself - 6 years

danceswithvowels - 25 years

eykd - 25 years

lambacck - 3 years

bittercoder - 2 years

sfaruque - 25 years

tartley - 1 years

gklein - 25 years

1stvamp - 7 years

vvarp - 2 years

shiny - 24 years

mfandreas - 5 years

mowens - 24 years

larry - 24 years

thumper - 3 years

Bunglebogs - 24 years

davisagli - 5 years

paltman - 2 years

daniellindsley - 5 years

sceptreofjudah - 23 years

rogerclark - 23 years

Sitwonade - 23 years

mwalling - 3 years

Sitwon - 23 years

ShawnMilo - 23 years

drakkos - 1 years

eddymul - 23 years

honzakral - 3 years

CerealBoy - 22 years

passy - 6 years

sli - 22 years

ghoseb - 1 years

moriogawa - 22 years

sbastn - 1 years

asenchi - 22 years

zellyn - 1 years

jefftriplett - 22 years

pmclanahan - 7 years

cdeblois - 22 years

davidpaccoud - 4 years

quakehead - 21 years

Kanru - 21 years

floyd - 21 years

eculver - 2 years

sjaekel - 3 years

iamteem - 1 years

ubersoldat - 3 years

adamcik - 20 years

nsmgr8 - 1 years

NX172 - 19 years

bocke - 5 years

natevw - 3 years

krisse2 - 18 years

dan - 18 years

greyfade - 18 years

binarydud - 1 years

Swizec - 2 years

nbprithv - 17 years

xhae - 17 years

amackera - 17 years

sdhamilton - 17 years

mantovani - 17 years

Raisapius - 17 years

joshontheweb - 1 years

bkonkle - 2 years

andyrak - 16 years

thaostra - 16 years

mallipeddi - 2 years

timus - 16 years

gridaphobe - 16 years

perimosocordiae - 15 years

MechanisM - 15 years

CrociDB - 15 years

rragan

1985–

joemcmahon

1987–

When the Cray Y-MP was delivered at NASA, the sales engineer suggested that instead of having to learn C, ack, sed, and shell, I should just learn Perl. It's been my primary language ever since then. First use was support code for the Convex Unitree system at NASA; switched over to Web programming, and then branched out into QA automation. Now working at blekko.com ... doing something I can't talk about yet. But still Perl!

vangale

1987–1999

Don't remember the exact year but it was when Perl 2.0 was first sent across Usenet on comp.lang.sources. Was blown away by how much easier it made system level programming. Later after having to use it full time for a job was blown away by how hard it was to maintain. Have tried to avoid it since.

ironfort

1990–

dfan

1990–1998

gnat

1992–

Picked up Perl in the early days of the web. It was used to reformat text into HTML, and of course in the elegant Plexus web server. Back then, before CGI, we got dynamic web pages by hacking the web server to do different things based on the URL. It's obviously better to do that in Perl than in C, so Perl took off. I moved to the US, helped tchrist with the FAQ which lead to the cookbook which lead to training and conferences and YAPC and perl6 and The Perl Foundation and all sorts of wonderful things. Perl was the first time I saw a community coalesce. There's something magic when people who know each other online meet for the first time in person. I've seen it happen at other conferences since, but the early days of The Perl Conference were special because it was the first time I'd seen it happen, and I was part of it. Love the Perl community just as I love Perl, warts and all. I use other programming languages from time to time, hang out in other communities from time to time, but Perl and I know each other the best.

ndw

1992–

liza

1993–2001

Migrated to Python.

bmaxwell

1993–

jtauber

1994–1998

Used Perl 4 a lot and Perl 5 a bit. Haven't touched it since I learnt Python, though.

1994–1998

I was young, I needed the money.

AndyC

1994–1995

Dabbled with Perl in the early days of CGI on webservers. I hate it with a passion.

boutell

1994–2005

I wrote "CGI Programming in C and Perl," which was a PHP 4 book, but not bad overall. I also wrote PerlMUD, which would probably be in wider use if I hadn't had the unmitigated gall to charge a whopping $25 (later $10) for registration (even though you had the source already with your initial download). Geez, did I make any money off that? Only... oh, nearly $2,000, hey not bad. I liked Perl for quick and dirty stuff. I never really liked Perl as a higher-level language. Perl's wacky combination of assembler-like looseness ("want your parameters? UNPACK THEM YOURSELF") and APL obtuseness ("pick the right punctuation mark or DIE") never sat well with me. PHP is a great relief from the latter. And I gather Perl 6 is moving away from that as well, but probably stuck in the mud of being too much like Ruby and Python to bother with.

rrainey

1994–

zeroaltitude

1995–

This is the language I learned to program in, and despite its highly write-only nature, I will always like it.

vitaliyf

1995–2000

I have not touched Perl since discovering Python and, to some degree, PHP.

growe

1995–

Have written a few CGI script handlers in Perl, but it's an absolutely vile language. Its main purpose seems to be to keep Larry Wall's ego inflated - his book on Perl is filled with page after page of "see how much smarter than you I am" for being able to write Perl code that can navigate a toaster to Jupiter in only 2 lines and uses only obscure punctuation symbols.

takitimu

1995–

Used it for cgi-bin scripts in a weather app I wrote ( SGI graphics, web UI ).

jjames

1995–

I was called crazy by everyone I met who had a job in software for obsessing about Perl 4. I still don't know how I found it or how it found me. Now people call me crazy for obsessing about Perl 6.

eMBee

1995–1997

self learned, did some scripts with it, didn't really appreciate the language until i got more proficient at shell usage years after i stopped using perl

dabeaz

1995–

Wrote the first Swig modules for both Perl 4 and Perl 5. Wouldn't say that I'm fluent, but I still use it every now and then--mainly to maintain some wiki software that's written in Perl.

ashugg

1995–

Only began teaching myself Perl 4 from the "Learning Perl" book when I found it too difficult to implement associative arrays in /bin/sh

1995–2002

1995–

1995–1997

1995–2000

1996–

Perl5, mostly for text processing and not for web use. Still use it, mostly where I've gotta maintain some existing project.

wilane

1996–

That's the linguist part of me, hey Larry, I do more of a One Trivial Way To Do It

1996–

1996–2007

1996

1996–

The second best...evar!

1996–1997

1996–

1997–2010

1997–

Learned for a consulting job. Still write at least one 1-liner every day.

reed

1997–

RossP

1997–2000

Never really learnt this - but pretty much all self-hosted scripts (remember the term "CGI Script?") at the time were in Perl.

carljm

1998–2003

My first dynamic-language love. I remember in college taking a look at an mbox-parser a friend was struggling for hours to write in C and telling him "I could do that in Perl in ten minutes." He called the challenge; I locked my door and had it done in 9:37. Haven't used it much since I found Python.

westonruter

1998–

My programming mother tongue. I ate up that Perl For Dummies book I bought at Barns & Noble in Federal Way, Washington! First project? RuterSearch: http://weston.ruter.net/projects/rutersearch/ I still use Perl a lot of text processing and for various system utilities. PHP has replaced Perl for web development, which I hope to replace with Python ASAP.

streetcleaner

1998–2001

bg4

1998–

Use it when it is the right tool for the job. Implemented a B2B ordering system for a company internship while in college.

jamesotron

1998–2000

For a while there I was seduced by the dark side, but she doesn't know how to treat you right.

Cema

1998–

benjaminws

1998–

I started programming in Perl, was hopelessly devoted to it for years.

robhudson

1998–2001

Perl & CGI. Yeehaw!

David

1998–

jkocherhans

1998–1999

arowla

1998–2009

Started with the camel book back in the days of CGI. Revisited Perl in a big way for building major database-backed web applications at Rentrak. It helps to have source filters which make it so you don't have to shift your arguments off of @_.

givas

1998–2000

adders

1999–

Used it on and off since 1999, first at University and then on random projects since. Probably stop using it and move to Python or something else soon.

pydanny

1999

Dabbled with Perl. Loved the regular expressions but revisiting my work months later made me realize a flaw of regex. Or perhaps I just wrote spaghetti code?

jbeigel

1999–2002

twhitton

1999–

Ah, the old aptly titled swiss army chainsaw. The first truly agile language I've ever learned. Coming from C to Perl was like going from a match to a flame thrower. Probably not the best choice for large applications, but that never stopped me. I still use Perl to tear through text but not much else these days.

jcarbaugh

1999–2002

Perl was the first "real" programming language that I learned. I wrote a bunch of CGI applications for a web site that I worked on... stuff like guestbooks, forums, and rudimentary databases backed by flat files.

r1chardj0n3s

1999–2001

2 years too much. See also Java.

cpt_ahag

2000–2007

My language of choice when I majored in computational linguistics, but switched to Python a few years ago and am even happier now...:-D

nathans

2000–

danceswithvowels

2000–

Still roxors for regex! I used perl as a regex generator to edit 10K+ login scripts.

eykd

2000–

lambacck

2000–2002

marcelor

2000–2004

Black days. Enjoyed the switch from Bash to Perl but finally I ended up going to the dark side of his magic.

bittercoder

2000–2001

Taught myself Perl while studying - worked on a project to provide a Perl based platform for converting ASP based "commerce server" applications across to Perl (replicated the whole commerce server pipeline etc.)

sfaruque

2000–

jeffself

2000–2005

One of my favorite languages. The first "scripting" language that I used because I was learning Linux and what else was there in the late 90's? Since have moved on to Python.

2000

2000–

2000–2006

2001–2002

2001–

2001–2002

2001–

2001–2005

Learned it in one evening spent with the Camel book trying to build a Pig Latin web filter. Still holds a soft spot in my heart.

shiny

2001–

graduated, and became a perl programmer straight away

thumper

2001–2003

Needed perl for work. Once I found python, I never touched perl again.

2001–2005

2001–2005

2001–

2002–2004

My language of choice for more complicated scripts, abandoned if for python.

drakkos

2002

Played with it a little for building server side web apps for an early web page. Hate it with a passion.

Sitwon

2002–

ShawnMilo

2002–

After doing a lot of VBScript (ASP, VB6, etc.), I fell in love with Perl's raw power and efficiency. The regex integration is fantastic, and nothing beats it for one-liners to process text files. Throw it in the mix with a bunch of piped-together Unix commands for a remarkably powerful impromptu parser.

2002–

2002–

2002–

2002–2004

2002–

2003–

Did a bit of Perl programming for a company. Mostly small scripts and web crawlers.

jefftriplett

2003–

Merely flirted and wrote a few scripts.

zellyn

2003

Just for one project. Loved the community, though.

sbastn

2003

First scripting language. Messed up my brain badly. But I love it for that. Had to quit though. It was not Perl, it was me. I was not ready for it.

CerealBoy

2003–

pmclanahan

2003–2009

Had to use it for $work. Liked it at first, then found Python. Haven't looked back.

sli

2003–

ghoseb

2003

cdeblois

2003–

First job doing web applications and it's been a part of each job following.

passy

2003–2008

moriogawa

2003–

davidpaccoud

2004–2007

Did a bit of scripting and text processing. Regex and CPAN are great but I never got use to Perl magical syntax. I definitly replaced Perl with Python.

quakehead

2004–

All hackers use perl! Was turned off by all the single character text operators, but I got over it. Yep, it's the 800-pound swiss army chain saw of programming languages. Who needs other tools if they've got perl?

Kanru

2004–

floyd

2004–

nsmgr8

2005

Too much cryptic, will not touch it again.

adamcik

2005–

Great in the right hands, horrible in the wrong ones (just like any other language I guess).

2005–2007

2005

2005–2006

2005–2007

You'll like Perl 'til you meet Python.

natevw

2006–2008

Used for several big projects in my first programming job, so it became my go-to scripting language whenever I gave up on plain shell scripts (i.e. every time I started anything in Bash).

2006–

2006–2010

2007–

2007–

2007–

Never properly learned Perl until I needed it at work one day. I very quickly noticed that my own (novice) code was more compact and clear than any of the PHP I'd ever written. My first clue that my gut feelings about PHP were right.

binarydud

2007

bkonkle

2008–2009

Used for scripting while in a strict corporate IT environment that blocked the use of Python.

nbprithv

2008–

USING CATALYST FRAMEWORK TO BUILD POWERFUL WEB APPLICATIONS QUICKLY, EFFICIENTLY WHILE FOLLOWING BEST PRACTICES.

joshontheweb

2008

Took a couple of classes with Perl in University. I liked it, but it is a bit primitive compared to other modern languages. don't use it anymore.

sdhamilton

2008–

Wrote some text processing scripts for a linux box, much prefer python.

mantovani

2008–

amackera

2008–

Wrote a translator for a packet stuffing language while working for a networking company. My brain still hurts.

Swizec

2008–2009

Raisapius

2008–

Hooray for regular expressions! I'm still in the process of learning this. OOP in Perl feels weird, though.

xhae

2008–

timus

2009–

mallipeddi

2009–2010

Learnt Perl to maintain a bunch of scripts at work.

thaostra

2009–

Wanted to learn it before, but discouraged by others saying it resembled "line noise". After finally trying it, it's safe to say that Perl is actually quite readable yet compact if one takes the right approach. I like it.

andyrak

2009–

gridaphobe

2009–

CrociDB

2010–

I'm still learning it.

perimosocordiae

2010–

MechanisM

2010–

bartTC