Perl
:Perl: /perl/ n. [Practical Extraction and Report Language, a.k.a.
Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister] An interpreted language
developed by Larry Wall (<>, author of `patch(1)' and
`rn(1)') and distributed over Usenet. Superficially resembles awk
but
is much hairier, including many facilities reminiscent of `sed(1)' and
shells and a comprehensive Unix system-call interface. Unix sysadmins,
who are almost always incorrigible hackers, generally consider it one of
the languages of choice
and it is by far the most widely used tool
for making `live' web pages via CGI. Perl has been described, in a
parody of a famous remark about `lex(1)', as the Swiss-Army chainsaw
of Unix programming. Though Perl is very useful, it would be a stretch
to describe it as pretty or elegant
people who like clean, spare
design generally prefer Python
. See also Camel Book
, TMTOWTDI
Jargon File Version 4.3.1, 29 JUN 2001 =
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