The programming language Larry Wall first released publicly in 1987 was Perl.
Wall developed Perl while working as a systems administrator and programmer. He wanted a practical tool that could combine text processing, report generation, and system administration tasks more conveniently than the available Unix utilities. Perl 1.0 was announced on December 18, 1987.
The name “Perl” originally referred to the “Practical Extraction and Report Language,” although Wall later emphasized that the expansion was not the only interpretation. The language became especially influential in Unix administration, text processing, and early web development because it handled regular expressions, files, and strings efficiently.
Perl is sometimes confused with Python or Ruby because all three are high-level scripting languages commonly used for automation and text processing. Perl’s distinctive history includes its large standard library, expressive regular-expression support, and the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, known as CPAN. Perl 5, released in 1994, became the foundation of most later Perl programming.