The latest Perl Journal estimated that there are over 1,000,000 Perl users worldwide and more than 200 local Perl user groups exist on six continents. Perl is the most popular web programming language due to its text manipulation capabilities and rapid development cycle. It is widely known as "the duct-tape of the Internet". Perl is a stable cross platform programming language. It is used for mission critical projects in the public and private sectors and is widely used to program web applications of all needs.

Perl is a general-purpose programming language originally developed for text manipulation and now used for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming, GUI development, and more.

The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete). Its major features are that it's easy to use, supports both procedural and object-oriented (OO) programming, has powerful built-in support for text processing, and has one of the world's most impressive collections of third-party modules. Perl is not only a 'scripting language', but is used in extensive and complex applications in all fields of the technology. Perl can handle encrypted Web data, including e-commerce transactions. Perl can be embedded into web servers to speed up processing by as much as 2000%. Perl's DBI package makes web-database integration easy. mod_perl allows the Apache web server to embed a Perl interpreter, Perl's CGI.pm module, part of Perl's standard distribution, allowing easy handling of HTML forms.