Perl – An Awesome Programming Language

I have just finished learning the programming language Perl, and let me tell you, this is one amazing language. It can do almost anything! It's very easy to learn if you have a knowledge of C or C++. If you don't, I suggest learning Python first. I learned that very quickly, in a day or two.

Perl can do so many things, from create web pages to let you pretend to be the Googlebot. There are many extension libraries to Perl that allow the user to easily do new things in their program, like LWP, the library that can connect to TCP/IP ports, and return data! This is very useful for writing instant messaging programs, or web browsers.

In my opinion, the only drawback with Perl is that it usually is not compiled, but interpreted. One disadvantage because of this is that the user cannot just type the name of your program to run it. They have to input something like “perl [filename.pl] [optional arguments]”, but this problem can easily be solved using a batch file or shell script. Another annoying part is that the user can always see the source code of your program by opening the Perl file with a text editor, but if you're a fan of open source software, like I am, this is no problem.

There are so many different operating systems that support Perl. Many Linux distributions include Perl already installed, but there are Perl interpreters for other platforms, like Windows, Mac, Amiga, BeOS, and more! Even Windows 3.1!

If you're interested in using Perl to program, you can go to Perl.org to download an interpreter for your operating system.

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