The Importance of Perl

Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. and Ben Smith, Ronin House

Despite all the press attention to Java and ActiveX, the real job of "activating the Internet" belongs to Perl, a language that is all but invisible to the world of professional technology analysts but looms large in the mind of anyone -- webmaster, system administrator or programmer -- whose daily work involves building custom web applications or gluing together programs for purposes their designers had not quite foreseen. As Hassan Schroeder, Sun's first webmaster, remarked: "Perl is the duct tape of the Internet."

Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall as a scripting language for UNIX, aiming to blend the ease of use of the UNIX shell with the power and flexibility of a system programming language like C. Perl quickly became the language of choice for UNIX system administrators.

With the advent of the World Wide Web, Perl usage exploded. The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) provided a simple mechanism for passing data from a web server to another program, and returning the result of that program interaction as a web page. Perl quickly became the dominant language for CGI programming.With the development of a powerful Win32 port, Perl has also made significant inroads as a scripting language for NT, especially in the areas of system administration and web site management and programming.

For a while, the prevailing wisdom among analysts was that CGI programs--and Perl along with them--would soon be replaced by Java, ActiveX and other new technologies designed specifically for the Internet. Surprisingly, though, Perl has continued to gain ground, with frameworks such as Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) and the Apache web server's mod_perl allowing Perl programs to be run directly from the server, and interfaces such as DBI, the Perl DataBase Interface, providing a stable API for integration of back-end databases.

This paper explores some of the reasons why Perl will become increasingly important, not just for the web but as a general purpose computer language. These reasons include: