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Perl was created in 1987 by Larry Wall as a tool for making reports. It exploded in the 90s as the lingua franca of CGI scripts and system administration. Today it's still everywhere on Unix systems — apt, git hooks, log parsers, mail filters.

use strict;
use warnings;

print "Hello, Perl!\n";

Always use strict and warnings. Without them Perl silently accepts undeclared variables and other footguns. With them you get errors and warnings that catch real bugs.

• use strict — requires variables to be declared with my, our, or local
• use warnings — turns on diagnostic warnings (uninitialized values, etc.)

print does NOT add a newline — you must include \n. say does add one (requires use feature 'say'; or use 5.010;).

Comments use #. Statements end in ;.