[kazinator]

> Perl was basically written because Larry Wall found Awk's syntax to be a little too cryptic.

That seems ridiculous; where is it substantiated?

When Wall posted Perl to comp.sources.unix for the first time, he wrote "If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little faster, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C, then perl may be for you."

Or rather, not Larry Wall, but the apparent newsgroup moderator added that text, lifting it from the Perl manual page.

Thus he was pitching it as something that performs faster than awk and sed, with a greater range of capabilities.

[adrianmonk]

On pp. 381-382, my copy of Programming Perl (1992 printing of first edition) says he was trying to build a configuration management system for 6 Vax and 6 Sun machines, and he needed to solve some problems like file replication across a 1200 baud link and approvals. So he installed B-news, the Usenet news software at the time. Then he was asked to generate some reports and:

> News was maintained in separate files on a master machine, with lots of cross references between files. Larry's first thought was "Let's use awk." Unfortunately, awk couldn't handle opening and closing of multiple files based on information in the files. Larry didn't want to have to code a special-purpose tool. As a result, a new language was born.

So that's why it's the Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. He wanted to extract data from files and generate reports.

[jandrese]

That was a little tongue in cheek but there is a comment in the Camel book about how he wrote perl because he was scared of Awk's parser.

[vram22]

Could have been a joke. His writing (and talks, like the "State of" ones, is full of them, some of them a bit subtle too :)