Practical Extracting and Reporting Language (author Larry Wall) is very intuitive. and follows the expression: TIMWTODI ("There is many ways to do it"). Sun in his White Paper on Java compred Java, reproaching Perl only the lack of garbage collector.

How works Perl ? Unlikely others which interpret line after line, as good old basic, the Perl interpretor compiles the Perl scripts just to be executed, which permits two things: syntax verification, and a great execution speed. Perl is sequential and Object Oriented, so it is free to the user to make his choice. But it has in standard numerous libraries of functions which makes its portability from one OS to another extreme. It is also possible to export Perl code to C, and compile interfaces to existing libraries to use them in Perl. The other expression frequently heard about it is: pride, lazyness and impatience ! The first due to "look at what I can do in three code lines !", the second is "the three code lines" and the third is still those 3 code lines ! High level Network libraries do that it is as easy to program in Perl than in Java, associative arrays, stacks, hash tables ... all is there, and even advanced network libraries. The last version called Perl5 is available on all CPAN (Comprehencive Perl Archive Network) sites.