Ruby by Example

Perl

Perl is known by its mantra TMTOWTDI, and it is an extremely flexible and utilitarian language—one that has certainly had an impact on both Ruby and programming, in general. TMTOWTDI stands for There’s More Than One Way To Do It, which is a design philosophy that Perl certainly exemplifies. Its role in stressing the importance of regular expressions is enough to earn it a place in history. Perl was invented in 1987 by Larry Wall, and it was primarily intended to perform a role similar to that of Unix-centric languages like shell, awk, and sed. Perl focuses on ease of use for tasks like Unix system administration, and it is heavily used for web applications, as well. Perl’s initial design was procedural, but in recent years it has moved in ...