Developed by Larry Wall (late 80's) as a replacement for awk.

Has grown to become a replacement for awk, sed, grep, other filters, shell scripts, C programs, ... (i.e. "kitchen sink").

An extremely useful tool to know because it:

• runs on Unix, Linux, Mac, Amiga, OS/2, VMS, DOS, Windows, ...
• de facto standard for complex scripting tasks (once were shell scripts)
• has standard libraries for many applications (Web/CGI, DB, ...)