What is Perl?

Perl is a general-purpose, high-level, interactive, and interpreted programming language created by Larry Wall in 1987, originally developed as a tool for UNIX systems. The name “Perl” stands for “Practical Extraction and Report Language”.

Perl is widely used in areas such as system administration, network programming, web development, and data processing. Perl is considered a commonly used scripting language in Unix and Linux systems. Perl is particularly strong in the area of regex (regular expressions), making it a popular choice for data extraction and processing tasks.

The Perl programming language has a large standard library, and these libraries can be used for various programming tasks. Some of the most popular libraries for the Perl programming language are listed below:

CGI.pm: This library is a Perl module that helps in creating CGI applications. It can be used to perform various CGI operations, such as processing form data, uploading files, reading and writing cookies.

DBI: A popular library used to access databases in Perl. DBI can be used to access different databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server.

Moose: This library provides a set of advanced tools related to object-oriented programming. Moose makes it easier to create classes, create objects, and define properties and methods.

Mojolicious: This library is used to create web applications in Perl. It includes many features such as an HTTP server, template engine, session management, authentication, and RESTful web services.

Dancer: This is a lightweight web application framework. It is used to quickly develop web applications using Perl. It supports features such as HTTP redirections, session management, template engine, and RESTful web services.

Catalyst: This is an MVC (model-view-controller) web application framework. It is used to develop large web applications using Perl. It includes many features such as database interaction, session management, authentication, and extensibility.

BioPerl: This library is used to develop bioinformatics applications using Perl. It can be used to process biological data, analyze sequences, perform BLAST searches, and perform many biological tasks such as protein structures.

The libraries listed above are widely used in Perl programming language and offer developers a variety of options to use for different tasks.