This document presents a project proposed by The Perl Foundation for Google's 2021 Season of Docs program.
Perl is a free, open-source, general-purpose programming language originally developed by Larry Wall in the 1980s. Fast, flexible, and expressive, Perl quickly found its way onto just about every Unix-derived operating system (and then some).
During the 1990s, Perl’s ubiquity and ease of use played an integral role in the explosive growth of the infant Web. Today, Perl enjoys ongoing maintenance and development thanks to a core team of volunteers. It remains a part of countless computers' internal toolkits, and continues to power software including critical operating system features, websites of every sort, and myriad creative hobby projects.