Perl is an interpreted language optimized for scanning arbitrary
text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing
reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many
system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical
(easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny,
elegant, minimal). It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some
of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with
those languages should have little difficulty with it (Perl Man page).
I'm not one of these people who can sit down and design an
entire system from scratch and figure out how everything relates
to everything else, so I knew from the start that I had to take
the bear-of-very-little-brain approach, and design the thing to
evolve. But that fit in with my background in linguistics, because
natural languages evolve over time (Larry Wall).
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