Why Is It Called 'Perl'? — The Origin of the Name

Perl didn’t start as an acronym. It started as a pearl — a precious, beautiful thing. But there was already a language called Pearl, and so the name was shortened by one letter, and a backronym was born. The result is one of the most colorful naming stories in programming history.

The Story

In 1987, Larry Wall was a systems administrator at Burroughs Corporation (later Unisys) and needed a tool to process configuration files and generate reports. He had tried using awk, sed, and shell scripts, but nothing quite did what he needed. So he did what any good programmer would do: he wrote his own language.

He called it “Pearl” — short, elegant, and precious. But before he could release it to the world, he discovered that there was already a programming language called Pearl. It wasn’t widely known, but it existed, and naming conflicts are bad form in the programming community. Reluctantly, he dropped the “a” and called it “Perl.”

The name needed an expansion — a backronym — because programmers love their acronyms. Larry Wall came up with “Practical Extraction and Report Language,” which perfectly described what the language was designed for. Later, when Perl grew beyond text processing into a general-purpose language, the community jokingly proposed “Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister” — a reference to Perl’s famously flexible syntax and Larry’s linguistics background.

How It Evolved

Perl exploded in popularity in the 1990s as the go-to language for CGI scripts on the early web. Its name became synonymous with the phrase “the Swiss Army chainsaw of text processing” — messy, powerful, and capable of anything. The O’Reilly media books, with their distinctive animal covers, chose the camel as Perl’s mascot (for the Practical Extraction language — “the camel is a beast of burden that gets the job done”).

Larry Wall, a linguist by training, infused the language and its community with three core virtues: laziness (the quality that makes you write good programs because you don’t want to do unnecessary work), impatience (the anger you feel when the computer is being slow), and hubris (the arrogance that makes you write programs that others won’t want to say bad things about). These virtues are as much a part of Perl’s identity as its name.

The Perl community embraced the name’s origin story with characteristic humor. The language’s tagline “There’s More Than One Way To Do It” (TMTOWTDI, pronounced “tim-toady”) reflects the philosophy that Perl’s name — a near-miss, a workaround, a creative compromise — was always a perfect metaphor for the language itself.

Did You Know?

The original Pearl language that forced the name change was apparently not a programming language at all — it was a data description language that never gained widespread use. Larry Wall has joked that he probably could have kept the name “Pearl” without anyone noticing, but he chose to be graceful. The Perl 6 rewrite (now called Raku) was named as a homage to the original “sister” language that never was.

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