Version
You can check which version of Perl you are using by running the following command in your terminal:
perl -v
Why the jump to a major version? Why Perl 7, not Perl 6?
There are two parts to this answer. First, Perl 6 was already taken by what is now known
as
Raku.
Perl 7 code will still be v5.32 code (mostly) in syntax and behavior though.
About Perl
Perl is a programming language praised by many for its text processing capabilities, although as we will learn,
it has many other capacities that are very welcome in the toolset of any developer.
It was first developed in 1987 by a systems administrator working for NASA, Larry Wall.
The purpose of Perl initially was simply to make reporting systems easier, which is the reason why the language is
so efficient with text.
We will learn that it serves many other purposes in the modern technological landscape.
Perl evolved through the early 2000s as a general use language, which shaped it to become what it is today.
Perl is used for many different reasons nowadays. Popularly, it is what’s referred to as a glue language, where
many different modules,
possibly written in different languages are pasted together by Perl to work together for a specific application.
Nevertheless, Perl is used for heavy data mining and text-based analysis, this is because of the text editing
capabilities that it has.
It also is a scripting language, which means that it can work alongside Unix systems to manage logs,
and also files that naturally show in these operating systems. Perl is not as popular as people expected back in
the day,
but it is unparalleled in how it coordinates modules together, and also in the way that it processes lists and
large amounts of text data.
Interestingly, Perl has been nicknamed "The swiss army chainsaw of scripting languages".
This is because of its huge versatility and raw processing capabilities.
It is also perceived to be inelegant in the way that it runs and is written,
but it is absolutely essential in holding web applications together, even nowadays.
A very useful characteristic is that Perl is multiparadigmatic,
meaning that one can do object-oriented programming, functional programming, as well as the procedural paradigm.
This adds to its versatility across different web applications that Perl is so good with.
Releases
Perl has had an interesting history of iterations, beginning with version 1 in 1987, all the way to Perl 4 in
1993,
where it was abandoned by the creator to begin work on Perl 5, which was released in 1994 and maintained until
2014.
Perl 6 was renamed “Raku” in 2019, and existed simultaneously with Perl 5 in 2013 and 2014,
and continues up to this date under the name of Raku. Perl7 is expected to release in mid-late 2021.