/pɜːrl/
[Practical Extraction and Report Language, a.k.a Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister]
n. An interpreted language developed by Larry Wall (lwall@jpl.nasa.gov, author of 'patch(1)' and 'rn(1)') and distributed over USENET. Superficially resembles 'awk(1)', but is much hairier (see awk). UNIX sysadmins, who are almost always incorrigible hackers, increasingly consider it one of the languages of choice. Perl has been described, in a parody of a famous remark about 'lex(1)', as the "Swiss-Army chainsaw" of UNIX programming.