Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier.^[7]

According to Wall,Perl has two slogans. The first is "There's more than one way to do it",commonly known as TMTOWTDI. The second slogan is "Easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible".^[9]

The design of Perl can be understood as a response to three broad trends in the computer industry: falling hardware costs,rising labor costs,and improvements in compiler technology. Many earlier computer languages,such as Fortran and C,aimed to make efficient use of expensive computer hardware. In contrast,Perl was designed so that computer programmers could write programs more quickly and easily.