Invented by Bell Labs employee Larry Wall in 1987 and released to the comp.sources.misc newsgroup on December 18th, 1987, this venerable scripting language had originally been intended to manipulate text information. It was based on the C language and later went on to play an important role in the development of the web. One of the oldest, simplest, and most powerful programming languages in existence, it enjoys a hardcore following, and shows no signs of disappearing anytime soon. It’s earned it’s place in the great moments of computing history by still being in use to power websites and applications today. Perl version 5 was released on September 17th, 1994.
In 2001, it was decided that Perl 6 would run on a cross-language virtual machine called Parrot. As of 2005 both Perl 6 and Parrot were under active development. Perl 6 has yet to see the light of day and is one of the most famous pieces of vaporware ever.