# The Perl programming language

Perl is still quite ubiquitous, even though it first appeared in 1987.

- Raku is another name for Perl 6, but it was a misstep in development because they made so many changes that Perl 5 developers were unhappy with the shift.
  - In particular, Raku was *not* backwards-compatible with Perl 5.

For this reason, Perl stays a persistent language, and it makes more sense to use Python, Ruby, or JavaScript for most use cases.