Reply To: What the heck is Perl?

[Dr. Aditya Sardana]

Perl is a popular computer programming language, which was developed by Larry Wall in 1987. Perl stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language. Perl originated as a text-processing language but it has gradually attained the status of a full-fledged programming language. Perl is widely used in the fields of system programming, web programming, and bioinformatics (click here to see, what is bioinformatics?), to name some of the multitude of fields in which it is applied. Bioinformaticists or bioinformaticians love Perl as it offers great benefits for simplifying everyday bioinformatics’ tasks and facilitates research in bioinformatics. To know about advantages of Perl for biologists, see my post: Perl As Programming Language of Choice for Biologists!! Amongst the programmers, Perl is regarded as a language which has been especially designed to make everyday programming jobs easy.