Perl is a dynamic programming language created by Larry Wall and first released in 1987. Perl borrows features from a variety of other languages including C, shell scripting (sh), AWK, sed and Lisp.
Structurally, Perl is based on the brace-delimited block style of AWK and C, and was widely adopted for its strengths in string processing and lack of the arbitrary limitations of many scripting languages at the time.