You may think of PERL as something for Unix gurus, but wise Windows administrators can also benefit from this powerful scripting language.

Perl is a messy, maddening programming language, the “duct tape of the internet.” But at least you can tell it was made by humans.

Three years ago, Lynn Greiner interviewed the big cheeses responsible for the popular scripting languages PHP, Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby and JavaScript to find out where the languages were headed ...