Perl overview

Perl is a high-level, interpreted, dynamically-typed scripting language renowned for its powerful regular expression engine and text processing capabilities. Perl 5 is widely used in system administration, bioinformatics pipelines, CGI web scripting, and legacy enterprise applications. CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) provides one of the largest collections of reusable modules in any language ecosystem. Moose and Moo provide modern OOP layers on top of Perl's flexible object system. Perl 6 was reimagined as Raku, a separate language. Despite declining popularity, Perl remains deeply embedded in genomics tooling (BioPerl), network automation, and long-lived IT operations scripts.