What is Perl short for?

Perl is a general-purpose programming language created by Larry Wall in 1987. Contrary to popular belief, Perl is not an acronym but a simple, catchy name chosen for its brevity. The common phrase Practical Extraction and Report Language is a backronym created after Perl’s initial release to describe its text processing strengths, not an official expansion.

The Origin of the Name "Perl"

Larry Wall preferred a short, memorable name rather than a strict acronym. This fits Perl’s flexible philosophy famously summed up as TMTOWTDI (“There’s more than one way to do it”), reflecting the language’s pragmatism and openness to multiple solutions.

Perl Concepts in This Example

• use strict; and use warnings; enforce good coding practices by catching common mistakes.
• print demonstrates output and how Perl interprets string context.
• The backslash \\ escapes characters inside double quotes, illustrated by the apostrophe in the motto.
• Perl sigils like $ indicate scalar variables, though here only literal strings are printed.

Runnable Perl Example

This script prints a brief explanation and Perl’s motto. It runs successfully with any standard Perl 5.10+ interpreter and requires no external modules or resources:

use strict;
use warnings;

print "Perl is not strictly short for anything,\n";
print "but is often playfully expanded as 'Practical Extraction and Report Language'.\n";
print "Remember, Perl philosophy: 'There\\'s more than one way to do it!'\n";

Summary

Although “Practical Extraction and Report Language” is widely cited, Perl is simply “Perl”—a concise, friendly name chosen by its creator. This reflects its core spirit of flexibility and pragmatism, captured in the motto TMTOWTDI.