hi,
i was wondering what perl was i downloaded Activeperl thinking it is some thing like a CMS lol but.... well u know what is it what can you do with it, i really want to know why it is soo famous ? hehe

thx
Scan

In layman's terms perl is a programming language based off of C, shell, Lisp and a few other things. It is mostly used for OS program, network operations and some website development (mostly cgi). Here are a fe wlinks to help you get a better understanding of what perl is

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl
http://www.perl.org/
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/perl-man

Perl's a really famous language because it's easy to do stuff with it. Most of the languages that tend to have similar capabilities have to be compiled - you have to write it, make a program, and then run the program. With perl, you can just write the program in a script and tell an actual program called perl to run it. - Saves time.
Generally speaking, it's faster to write a running program in perl once you know the language. It may not run really fast, but it's good for everyday tasks.
And I think I'll let wikipedia explain the rest.

It's like PHP, if that tells you anything...

YES THAT TELLs me a LOT really ! i do know PHP but not fluent similar to html.

Perhaps the answer is a little tardy, but here is my share anyway.

Perl is an (or another) interpretative language that gets lots of things done in a short time for many reasons.

One of the features, not necessary an advantage for some, is that the commands are very succinct: type very little, get a lot done. For those of you who know what APL is, you know what I mean. However, the real reason behind Perl's efficiency can be attributed to the extensive libraries. They are so rich in Perl, and so practical, that you can make a program to access the Internet in a matter of minutes, calculate moon phases, or satellite locations for GPS applications at any moment or place, do automated file manipulations or archives, schedule jobs, etc. One of the problems of today's windows for the good old DOS users is to write simple scripts like in Unix. Perl can handle that easily. Best of all, Perl is free, always free, so are the libraries, so are the updates.

No need to pay for new versions or upgrades every year or else your program will stop operating properly! That, I think is worth something!

THen if Perl is that awesome, why isnt it as popular as php, java or .net?? All this time, I had though perl was sort of like an unpopular or old server side scripting language, but I guess not, thanks for sharing this info.

I think Perl is something more like C or Basic and PHP etc.

It's a program language, not only used to make a dymatic website but also can make much more applications such as science comput.

It's too hard to a non-professional to learn.