Perl is a programming language originally written by Larry Wall. It's commonly used in both scripting and for web applications. Can be the prgramming component of a LAMP stack. See also Perl Wiki
Philosophy[]
Perl has moved away from the traditional Unix Philosophy since it is a single tool able to do a wide range of things. For any particular programming task there is typically several ways of doing it in Perl. This has lead to Perl's reputation as being hard to read.