I first heard of Perl when I was in middle school in the early 2000s. It was one of the world’s most versatile programming languages, dubbed the Swiss army knife of the Internet. But compared to its ...

Let me get this out of the way up front: Perl isn’t a beautiful language. It’s kind of a mongrel pup with pedigreed academic roots: C, AWK, Lisp, Pascal, sed, and a bit of Smalltalk and C++ tossed in ...