The general-purpose text-processing language first released in 1987 and designed by Larry Wall is Perl.
Larry Wall created Perl while working as a systems administrator and programmer. He wanted a practical tool that could process reports and combine capabilities associated with Unix utilities, shell scripting, and programming languages. Perl 1.0 was announced in 1987.
Perl became especially known for regular expressions, flexible string handling, powerful text-processing operators, and a large collection of reusable modules. Its name was initially associated with “Practical Extraction and Report Language,” although the language's official name is simply Perl.
Perl helped power early web applications and system administration before the widespread adoption of newer scripting languages. It is sometimes confused with PHP because both were popular in early web development, but they were created independently and have different histories. Perl remains available on major operating systems and is used in legacy systems, bioinformatics, and automation.