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Of course, if your job is programming, you can get your job done with any "complete" computer language, theoretically speaking. But we know from experience that computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy. At one extreme, the so-called fourth-generation languages make it easy to do some things, but nearly impossible to do other things. At the other extreme, so-called industrial-strength languages make it equally difficult to do almost everything.

Perl is different. In a nutshell, Perl is designed to make the easy jobs easy, without making the hard jobs impossible.

And what are these "easy jobs" that ought to be easy? The ones you do every day, of course. You want a language that makes it easy to manipulate numbers and text, files and directories, computers and networks, and especially programs. It should be easy to run external programs and scan their output for interesting tidbits. It should be easy to send those same tidbits off to other programs that can do special things with them. It should be easy to develop, modify, and debug your own programs too. And, of course, it should be easy to compile and run your programs, and do it portably, on any modern operating system.

Perl does all that, and a whole lot more.

Initially designed as a glue language for Unix, Perl has long since spread to most other operating systems. Because it runs nearly everywhere, Perl is one of the most portable programming environments available today. To program C or C++ portably, you have to put in all those strange #ifdef markings for different operating systems. To program Java portably, you have to understand the idiosyncrasies of each new Java implementation. To program a shell script portably, you have to remember the syntax for each operating system's version of each command and somehow find the common factor that (you hope) works everywhere. And to program Visual Basic portably, you just need a more flexible definition of the word "portable". :-)

Perl happily avoids such problems while retaining many of the benefits of these other languages, with some additional magic of its own. Perl's magic comes from many sources: the utility of its feature set, the inventiveness of the Perl community, and the exuberance of the open source movement in general. But much of this magic is simply hybrid vigor; Perl has a mixed heritage and has always viewed diversity as a strength rather than a weakness. Perl is a "give me your tired, your poor" language. If you feel like a huddled mass longing to be free, Perl is for you.

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