Perl is the grandfather of scripting languages, created by Larry Wall in the mid-80's. It borrowed / cobbled together / was designed to implement the best features of other popular languages such as sed, awk, sh, and C. Originally a purely procedural language, Perl added support for object-oriented programming in Perl 5.

This makes for a powerful language.

The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) provides a wealth of Perl modules and scripts.

The CGI module, which provides a standard interface for retrieving CGI form variables and generating HTML, quickly made Perl one of the most popular languages for creating Web applications.

The DBI module, which provides a standard database interface, quickly made Perl one of the most popular languages for creating database applications.