A - F

• Perl is the most popular web programming language. Over a million people program with Perl. That is approximately one Perl programmer for every resident of Hyderabad, Pakistan or Donetsk, Ukraine.
  • John P. Flynt (2006) Perl Power!: The Comprehensive Guide. p. 7

G - L

• Perl is the most popular language for creating CGI programs. Perl is the acronym for Practical Extraction and Report Language. Every computer platform supports this language and hence widely used.
  • K. L. James (2004) The Internet: A User's Guide. p. 192

• Perl is the ultimate language for text manipulation, and it has powerful tools for manipulation of lists and other data structures.
  • James M. Kretchmar (2004) Open Source Network Administration. p. 215

• And what defines a 'python activist' anyway? Blowing up Perl installations worldwide?
  • Ivan Van Laningham, June 2005, on comp. lang. python

M - R

• Last night, I drifted off while reading a Lisp book. Suddenly, I was bathed in a suffusion of blue.
  At once, just like they said, I felt a great enlightenment. I saw the naked structure of Lisp code unfold before me.
  (My god. It's full of "car"s.)
  The patterns and metapatterns danced. Syntax faded, and I swam in the purity of quantified conception. Of ideas manifest.
  Truly, this was the language from which the Gods wrought the universe!
  [God replies:] "No, it's not. [...] I mean, ostensibly, yes. Honestly, we hacked most of it together with Perl."
  • Randall Munroe, XKCD 224

• Some said the world should be in Perl,
  Some said in Lisp.
  Now, having given both a whirl,
  I held with those who favored Perl.
  But I fear we passed to men
  A disappointing founding myth.
  And should we write it all again,
  I'd end it with
  A close-paren.
  • Randall Munroe, "With Apologies to Robert Frost", XKCD 312, in a parody of Robert Frost

• As it seems to me, in Perl you have to be an expert to correctly make a nested data structure like, say, a list of hashes of instances. In Python, you have to be an idiot not to be able to do it, because you just write it down.
  • Peter Norvig, August 2000, on comp.lang.functional

• Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl.
  • Rob Pike (2004) in interview at slashdot.com, Oct 18 2004

• There's no obfuscated Perl contest because it's pointless.
  • Jeff Polk quoted in Donn Seeley (2004) "How Not to Write Fortran in Any Language." Queue. Dec/Jan 2004-05. p. 58

S - Z

• Haskell is faster than C++, more concise than Perl, more regular than Python, more flexible than Ruby, more typeful than C#, more robust than Java, and has absolutely nothing in common with PHP.
  • Audrey Tang Perl Internationalization and Haskell: An Interview with Autrijus Tang

• If you can't do bioinformatics, you can't do biology, and Perl is the biologist's favorite language for doing bioinformatics.
  • James Tisdall (2010) Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics

• Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something.
  • Larry Wall (1990) Usenet article <9682@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> (1990)

• A Perl script is "correct" if it gets the job done before your boss fires you.
  • Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant (2000) Programming Perl. O'Reilly Media, Inc. p. xviii

• The camel has evolved to be relatively self-sufficient. (On the other hand, the camel has not evolved to smell good. Neither has Perl.)
  • Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant (2000) Programming Perl. O'Reilly Media, Inc. p. 4

• [Boxed] Multiple bouncing balls in a box are a metaphor for community. Notice how the escaping balls explode. This is what happens to people who move from Perl to Ruby.
  • Larry Wall "The State of the Onion", perl.com, 2004-08-18 : In reference to the boxed screensaver that comes with xscreensaver.

• Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.
  • Larry Wall, cited in Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington (2004) Perl Cookbook second edition p. 150

• Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.
  • Larry Wall in "Perl style guide" perldoc.perl.org, 2005-2013