Why learn Perl?

Why should I learn Perl?

So why should you learn Perl? Here goes nothing:

1. Perl is Fun

Writing Perl code is very fun and rewarding. You don't have to deal with a lot of idiosyncracies like memory allocation and freeing, passing a context variable; the code is brief and effective; there is a lot of Do-What-I-Means (DWIMmeries) that make life simpler; with a small amount of awareness your code can be portable across all UNIXes, and even on Windows and other platforms; Perl is documented extensively and you can get a lot of interactive, human answers for your questions from mailing lists, online chats and web forums.

Most serious perl programmers love their language and love programming in it.

2. Perl is Useful

Perl has been successfully used for a lot of diverse tasks: text processing, system administration, web programming, web automation, GUI programming, games programming, code generation, bio-informatics and geneological research, lingual and etymological research, number crunching, and testing and quality assurance.

3. Perl is Open Source

Perl is fully Free (both gratis and libre) and Open Source Software, and is usable for almost any use. It can and has been used for in-house software, web software, open source software, or open source or non-open-source commercial software (see Movable Type or Request Tracker for instance).

4. Perl can Show You the World

Perl 5 has borrowed the most important programming paradigms, and implemented them in a consistent and fun way. It is a dynamic language, that supports Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), Functional Programming (FP), Aspect-Oriented Programming, and lots of other buzzwords, while not trying to prevent you from writing quick and dirty code to get your work done.

As such Perl is highly enlightening. If you know Perl well, you'll have no problem picking up such languages as Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, Microsoft .NET, or more obscure languages such as Scheme. In fact, Perl has proven very influential to a large extent on most of those languages.

Perl is also a useful stepping stone for learning ANSI C and C++, and also will improve your code writing in any language.

If you understand Perl, you'll understand the world!

5. Don't re-invent the wheel! Re-use commonly used, proven code

Perl has the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, which is a huge collection of useful (and not-so-useful) re-usable Perl modules, under an open source licence. They allow you to use them as libraries to facilitate writing your code. So instead of starting to write something yourself, do a CPAN search, or ask someone for a recommendation for a good CPAN module.

Great! Now how do I start?

See our resources page for links to pages with online resources to get you up to speed, and then better and better with Perl.