[tootie]

As someone who spent many years loving Perl, I counter that literally every programming language is obtuse and overloaded with meaningless symbols.

And I'd also credit Perl's rise to Lincoln Stein who wrote CGI.pm which was at the time the absolute state of the art for managing web applications with Apache and mod_cgi.

[mistrial9]

yes and, one of Perl's design goals was literally "report generation" .. which it turns out, might be in HTML format

[hedora]

It can't do reports. It's a rubbish lister.

It's also clearly not an anagram of REPL. I wonder if anyone ever figured out how to write REPL with a keyboard. I'd like to learn it some day.

(REPL was written in a crazy character set and relied on custom printed punch cards. I think it was the perl of its day.)

[bmn__]

CGI.pm is a port of Perl 4 cgi-lib.pl. Credit: http://cgi-lib.berkeley.edu/#credit