The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) is a repository of over 250,000 software modules and accompanying documentation for 39,000 distributions, written in the Perl programming language by over 12,000 contributors. CPAN can denote either the archive network or the Perl program that acts as an interface to the network and as an automated software installer. Most software on CPAN is free and open source software.
Kent Beck is an American software engineer and the creator of extreme programming, a software development methodology that eschews rigid formal specification for a collaborative and iterative design process. Beck was one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto, the founding document for agile software development. Extreme and Agile methods are closely associated with Test-Driven Development (TDD), of which Beck is perhaps the leading proponent.
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language".
Software development is the process used to create software. Programming and maintaining the source code is the central step of this process, but it also includes conceiving the project, evaluating its feasibility, analyzing the business requirements, software design, testing, to release. Software engineering, in addition to development, also includes project management, employee management, and other overhead functions. Software development may be sequential, in which each step is complete before the next begins, but iterative development methods where multiple steps can be executed at once and earlier steps can be revisited have also been devised to improve flexibility, efficiency, and scheduling.
Raku is a member of the Perl family of programming languages. Formerly named Perl 6, it was renamed in October 2019. Raku introduces elements of many modern and historical languages. Compatibility with Perl was not a goal, though a compatibility mode is part of the specification. The design process for Raku began in 2000.
Pugs is a compiler and interpreter for the Raku programming language, begun on 1 February 2005, by Audrey Tang. Raku was then called Perl 6.
Audrey Tang is a Taiwanese politician and free software programmer who served as the first Minister of Digital Affairs of Taiwan from August 2022 to May 2024. She has been described as one of the "ten greatest Taiwanese computing personalities". In August 2016, Tang was invited to join Taiwan's Executive Yuan as a minister without portfolio, making her the first transgender person and the first non-binary gender official in the top executive cabinet. Tang has identified as "post-gender" and accepts "whatever pronoun people want to describe me with online." Tang is a leader of the Haskell and Perl programming language communities, and is the core member of g0v.
Damian Conway is a computer scientist, a member of the Perl and Raku communities, a public speaker, and the author of several books. Until 2010, he was also an adjunct associate professor in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University.
The Perl Object Environment (POE) is a library of Perl modules written in the Perl programming language by Rocco Caputo et al.
Catalyst is an open-source web application framework written in Perl. It closely follows the model–view–controller (MVC) architecture and supports a number of experimental web patterns. It is written using Moose, a modern object system for Perl. Its design is heavily inspired by frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Maypole, and Spring.
brian d foy [sic] is the former publisher and editor of The Perl Review, a magazine devoted to Perl and co-author of several books on Perl including Learning Perl, Intermediate Perl and Mastering Perl. He is also the founder of Perl Mongers, the founder of the White Camel Awards, a frequent speaker at conferences including The Perl Conference and YAPC. He is the author of multiple Perl modules on CPAN and maintains the perlfaq portions of the core Perl documentation. He was a partner at Stonehenge Consulting Services from 1998 to 2009.
Sean Michael Burke is a Perl programmer, author, and linguist. He was a columnist for The Perl Journal from 1998 and has written several dozen Perl modules for CPAN, as well as books for O'Reilly Media.
Perl OpenGL (POGL) is a portable, compiled wrapper library that allows OpenGL to be used in the Perl programming language.
Test::More is a unit testing module for Perl. Created and maintained by Michael G Schwern with help from Barrie Slaymaker, Tony Bowden, chromatic, Fergal Daly and perl-qa.
Rakudo is a Raku compiler targeting MoarVM, and the Java Virtual Machine, that implements the Raku specification. It is currently the only major Raku compiler in active development.
Dan Sugalski was the initial designer and chief architect for the Parrot process virtual machine that was initially created to run Perl 6. In 2005 Dan handed over Parrot lead duties to Chip Salzenberg and shortly thereafter left the Parrot project.
Plack is a Perl web application programming framework inspired by Rack for Ruby and WSGI for Python, and it is the project behind the PSGI specification used by other frameworks such as Catalyst and Dancer. Plack allows for testing of Perl web applications without a live web server.
Dancer is an open source lightweight web application framework written in Perl and inspired by Ruby's Sinatra.
Mojolicious is a real-time web application framework, written by Sebastian Riedel, creator of the web application framework Catalyst. Licensed as free software under the Artistic License v 2.0, it is written in the Perl programming language, and is designed for use in both simple and complex web applications, based on Riedel's previous experience developing Catalyst. Documentation for the framework was partly funded by a grant from The Perl Foundation.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Perl programming language:
