From history.perl.org
here is an excerpt from the Perl 1.000 release notes of '87:
It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway)
some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people
familiar with those languages should have little difficulty
with it. (Language historians will also note some vestiges
of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC|PLUS.) Expression syntax
corresponds quite closely to C expression syntax. 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. There are also translators to turn
your sed and awk scripts into perl scripts. OK, enough hype.
Another piece of trivia: the initial release was delayed
until the awk to perl (a2p) translator was finished because
Larry felt Perl would not be well received without this vital
piece.
Of course, since that time, Perl has borrowed heavily from
other languages as well. And the tradition continues today in
the design of Perl 6 with a fancy name:
The Principle of Borrowing. :-)
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