Why Perl ??

What is the use of Perl ??

Perl is a programming language which is originally developed for text manipulation. It is mainly used for system administration, web development, network programming, GUI development, and more. Though Perl is not officially an acronym but few people used it as Practical Extraction and Report Language (P.E.R.L). It is an Open-Source programming language that licensed under the GPL or GNU General Public License.

Let's dive in and see what under the hood of perl programming langugage. Perl is a stable and cross platform programming language. The first version of Perl was Perl 1.0 . It was released in 1987. The most fundamental quality of Perl is that it supports both Object Oriented Programming (OOP) or Procedural Programming. It also support Unicode. So, you can easily implement any Unicode settings in the core programming framework.

Because Perl is a Open Source programming language, anyone can tweak it as they like to work in their own framework. It works very well with all types of mark-up languages like Hyper Text Mark-up Language (HTML), Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) etc. Its database integration is so powerful. The Database Integration Interface (DBI) supports many third-party databases like MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, Sybase and many more. Perl's DBI package makes web-database integration easy.

Perl used to be the most popular web programming language due to its text manipulation capabilities and rapid development cycle. Perl was designed specifically for text processing. It built-in text processing capability makes Perl as widely used server-side programming language. It is very much popular to the web programmers. The web developers can use Perl for both text processing and manipulation.

Perl can be embedded into web servers to speed up processing by as much as 2000%. it can handle encrypted Web data, including e-commerce transactions. That's why Perl is widely known as "the duct-tape of the Internet". It has Apache web server embedded option called "mod_perl" which embed a Perl interpreter with the web server. These features make Perl a loving programming language in the server side.

Perl is an interpreted language, which means that your code can be run as is, without a compilation stage. By this way, Perl can create a non portable executable program which is very much helpful in security purposes on the web. Traditional compilers like C or C++ compilers convert programs into machine language. When you run a Perl program, it's first compiled into a byte code, which is then converted into machine instructions when the program starts to run. It means if you don't run your Perl program, it will remain compiled into a byte code. No exectutable file can be found without running it.

Perl combines the features of languages like C with shell script’s ability to execute large sets of commands. Programmers can use Perl for developing a variety of software applications. It also has elements of "awk" and "sed", which is largely used in command line scripting to manipulate text. It makes it easier for programmers to integrate third-party interfaces or components which are not compatible with each other.

Perl is older than Python. But the interesting fact that it is way more faster than Python for many tasks and more powerful also. However, with the rise of Python as an alternative, this lead to the decline of Perl. One of the problems it faced was that scripts. Python has clear and solid scripts but Perl scripts are messy and aren’t as clear as Python. One of the mottoes of Perl is ‘There is more than one way to do it’, as opposed to Python which gives only a direct way to you for the solution. While that is good for the power users, with regards to the flexibility of solutions. But most new programmers prefer the cleaner code obviously and the direction Python gives as opposed to Perl. So Perl has lost ground in areas like genomics where the leading research in the field was done in the 90’s.

Perl has shortcuts which allow you to write quick scripts. The data types of Perl are first class rather than an add in. That's why you can manipulate them programmatically like any other first-class object. Perl is popular for Text manipulation, GUI developement etc. But in today's perspectives, Perl may not be as popular as before, but it’s presence cannot be ignored.

That's all, guys. If you are a Perl programmer, then let me know your likes and dislikes of this programming language by comments. Next time I'll come up with another topic. Till then Stay Home, Stay Safe. PEACE !!