Perl rocks

There is a little known language named Perl, and it is amazing.

Perl was created in 1987 by Larry Wall, and makes plain-text manipulation very easy and convenient. It features many constructions appart from the usual ones (`for`, `while`, `if-else`, etc) that fit into the declarative programming paradigm that is now being hyped. It has `map`, `grep` (filter) and others that make the language sometimes feel like a spoken language, rather than a rigid set of keywords and identifiers ruled by a group of syntax rules. This is just an illusion, though, since it is programming that we are doing after all. For me, I usually think of it as a middle-ground between statically typed and rigid languages and shellscript. It offers some of the flexibility of the shell, while enforcing an understandable syntax and proper variables, arrays and data-structures.

Where to start?

The main place to learn perl, would be to go to the official website.

Perl official website (Learn)

I started by reading some books. To bootstrap, I really liked `Impatient Perl` (overview), followed by `Moder Perl` (more in-depth).

Perl official books

Use `perldoc` for perl documentation, run `perldoc perl` for a starting point.

Izan, 03 March 2026, LLU blog