Today the Perl programming language is turning 30. That’s quite a milestone. At 30 you start to evaluate your life, you start to put things in perspective and see what you’ve done with yourself. Well, as a programming language Perl doesn’t go through all that, but that doesn’t mean we can’t showcase a few important events and milestones from the past three decades.

Here are 30 things about Perl, for 30 years of Perl programming.

1 Convex was the first major computer vendor to include Perl as part of its standard operating system distribution in 1990.

2 Programming Perl by Larry Wall and Randal Schwartz was published (the first edition) in January 1991.

3 Perl 5.0, a new version and a rewrite from Perl 4, and also the most enduring Perl version, was released on the 18th of October, 1994.

4 CPAN was introduced on October 26th, 1995.

5 Tim Bunce posted the first module list that lists CPAN as the central module repository.

6 CPAN has 194,488 Perl modules.

7 Right now, there are 13.138 CPAN authors.

8 Booking.com was founded in 1996, it’s one of the largest websites in the world, and is built mainly in Perl.

9 In 1996 Perl was used in the Human Genome Project in a significant way.

10 Gisle Aas wrote the first version of mod_perl. It was released on March 25, 1996. Mod_perl was a major improvement at the time.

11 Larry Wall held his first “State of the Onion” speech in 1997.

12 CGI was first released with Perl 5.004 on the 15th May 1997.

13 brian d foy organized the “Perl /M((o|u)ngers|aniacs)*/” in New York City. NY.pm was the first PM group, founded in October 1997.

14 There are currently 238 Perl Monger groups around the world.

15 YAPC or “Yet Another Perl Conference” is hosted by Kevin Lenzo at Carnegie-Mellon University in June 1999. This is the first YAPC event. Over the years it generated a slew of likemindedconferences across the world.

16 The Perl Monks community site was launched in February 2000.

17 Perl 6 was first announced in July 2000. It was finally released on Christmas, a short 15 years later.

18 The first European YAPC conference was held in London in September 2000.

19 YAPC::Israel:: (the first Israeli Perl conference) was held in Haifa University in Israel in May 2003.

20 YAPC::Taipei was held in March 2004.

21 YAPC::Australia, the first edition, was held as part of OSDC in Melbourne in December 2004.

22 January 2005 brought the first development release of Catalyst.

23 Also in 2005, Audrey Tang started Pugs, the Perl 6 compiler and interpreter.

24 Mojolicious was released in September 2008.

25 Dancer was released in July 2009.

26 Mason was released in 1998.

27 Perl 6 was released in December, on Christmas 2015.

28 Perl is Perl, not PERL.

29 Perl 6 is not a successor to Perl 5, but a whole new language.

30 TMTOWTDI is the Perl programming motto.

Happy Birthday Perl!

We are proud to be a Perl programming company and to include this amazing technology in our stack.

By Samuel Andras