I think we've been a bit unfair to Mr. Clinick.

Agreed. The article as a whole is very positive towards Perl and hugely respectful of Larry Wall and his contribution to the scripting world.

I included this quote because it contains a lesson: it shows how Obfuscation Contests can be used as a propaganda weapon to damage Perl's reputation. Since attempting to outlaw Perl obfu contests is clearly absurd, the best we can do to protect Perl's reputation is to respond promptly and accurately -- as brian_d_foy and merlyn did above. BTW, I heard a rumour (but I'm damned if I can find anything with google now) that O'Reilly did not sponsor the TPJ Obfuscated Perl Contests because they felt they would project the wrong image of Perl. Does anyone know if there is any truth to this rumour?

Perl actually stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language

To nitpick with Mr Clinick, I refer to the draft Oxford English Dictionary entry cited on history.perl.org:

Perl Brit.
Perl, perl, irreg. PERL
Computing.
perl n. ,
arbitrarily chosen for its positive connotations, with omission of
-a- to differentiate it from an existing programming language called
Pearl. Coined by Larry Wall in the summer of 1987; the program was
publicly released on 18 December of that year. Acronymic expansions of
the name (such as Practical Extraction and Report Language and
Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister), though found in the earliest
documentation for the language, were formed after the name had been
chosen. Coinage details confirmed by personal communication from L.
Wall, May 2000. A high-level interpreted programming language widely 
used for a variety of tasks and especially for applications running 
on the World Wide Web. The form Perl is preferred for the language 
itself; perl is used for the interpreter for the Perl language.
[download]

I love it that PERL is considered "irregular". :-)

Update (2024): as pointed out by Athanasius in Re^3: Google Research releases... PERL!:

According to Perl (wikipedia) : Wall wanted to give the language a short name with positive connotations. It is also a Christian reference to the Parable of the Pearl from the Gospel of Matthew.

However, Wall discovered the existing PEARL programming language before Perl's official release and changed the spelling of the name and dropped the "a" from the name. The existing language PEARL was an acronym for Process and Experiment Automation Realtime Language.

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